Paris Requiem, page 19
Checking all around me, I slowly drove away, taking the road south out of the city before turning east and then north. It would have played hell with my petrol ration, but I saw no choice. I also saw no one following me. Opening the throttle, I set off along the Lille road, feeling a greater sense of relief at leaving Paris behind me. It was almost a feeling of euphoria, like I used to get from the stuff Fran peddled. And just like the stuff Fran peddled, it didn’t last long. The further behind me I left Paris, the more I questioned what I was doing. The doubts started jumbling my brain. My speed reduced without me realising. I’d acted entirely on impulse, a desire to get out of the city and away from the scrutiny of the people following me and the pressure of pretence. I pulled off the road by a row of trees and threw up into a ditch, the bile sharp and foul in my mouth. There was little to spew.
‘Wait until they ration that,’ I told myself, my throat aching.
For some absurd reason, the thought made me laugh. Loud and hard like a false friend, until tears came. Silent now, and gulping in breaths of air, I sat down on the ground with my back to the car and stared out at a barren field, the crop either harvested or destroyed. I considered what I was doing, the calm of release from the city marshalling my ideas. By the time I stood up again and got behind the wheel, my thoughts were clearer.
Instead of turning back, though, I carried on my way. Leaving Paris further behind, my speed was now as steady and as constant as my determination. Not even a German patrol, on the outskirts of Senlis, could deter me. A jumpy stabsgefreiter in a forage cap and acne examined my police ID closely, but eventually waved me through. It was the brush with reality that I needed.
Checking my surroundings after the patrol, I realised I had to take it carefully from here to make sure I didn’t stray too far north. The Germans had designated a Forbidden Zone from the Swiss border stretching round in an arc to the Somme – the North-East Line, they called it – and I didn’t want to get too near and draw attention to myself. I doubted my police ID would do much to keep me out of trouble were I to cross it. I was crossing too many lines lately. I started looking for signs. There were none. I suppose I’d expected a big friendly billboard telling me I was on the right road. I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking for. I’d had to look it up the night before in my old school atlas. It wasn’t that helpful. Like it was a secret to be kept.
Plumping for a road that looked like it would lead me to where I wanted to go, I turned off the main road and found myself in a little place the size of a small street in Paris called Bailleul-le-Soc. At least there were trees.
I assumed it had to be the Bois d’Eraine.
29
I’d lived in Paris for too long. I was surrounded by farms and I had no idea what they farmed or what sort of thing they’d be doing this time of year. I stuck out like a pimp in a church hall. My hands were clean for one thing. Literally, at least, if not metaphorically.
Two houses stood together in their own tiny row separate from any other buildings. I saw no reason for their being there. I knocked on the door of the one on the right. It was opened by a wizened old guy with no teeth and a face tanned like an old chair. But then this was the country. He was probably younger than me.
‘Is this the Bois d’Eraine?’ I asked him.
He spat on the ground outside his front door and nodded. I shifted position just in case.
‘Is there a German garrison near here?’ I asked again. Just as well to get that out of the way.
That earned another spit on the ground, this one more emphatic.
‘Who wants to know?’ he asked me. I love country folk with their simple questions.
‘I do.’
‘You a flic? Or a German?’
‘Do I look German?’
‘A flic. What is it you want to know?’
This is where I had to start treading carefully.
‘Were you here when the fighting was on?’
‘Where else would I have been? Lived here all my life. Not moving now. Not for the Boches. Not for the Ministry.’
The way he said it, he obviously saw the Ministry, whichever one it was, as the greater enemy. I chose my words. ‘Were there any African troops here? In May or June?’
He spat a third time. It was getting tiresome. I longed for the mugs and thugs of Paris.
‘It’s young Fernand you want. Over that way. Two kilometres. Pig farm. Red roof.’ He spoke like he spat, a sort of scattergun eruption.
I returned to my car with a sense of eyes on me. The door to another house slammed shut as I drove past. The curtains in another twitched.
I found young Fernand without any trouble. It was a pig farm after all. I saw the red roofs at the end of a long lane long after the smell had lured me into its embrace.
Young Fernand opened the door before I was out of my car. ‘Young’ was evidently a relative term in these parts. He watched impassively as I trod warily through the steaming piles in his yard. The stench was overwhelming. I bet myself that the likelihood of my ruining my shoes was in direct proportion to footwear being the next thing to be rationed.
He gave me the country nod. It was used instead of wasteful luxuries like words to greet people. Just a single nod upwards, that was my lot.
‘You from the Ministry?’ he asked me.
‘Cop.’ I showed him my ID. ‘I take it the Ministry’s not popular around here?’ I still wondered which precise Ministry kept these people enraged at night.
‘You could say that.’
‘Can I come inside?’ I was trying to talk without opening my mouth to stop even more of the smell from getting in.
In response, he turned away, leaving the door open. I followed him into the kitchen. The warmth of the stove reminded me how cold the day had become outside. I stood by it, warming my hands. Next to the stove, a plate stood on the sink with a slice of ham on it that would have taken five hours to queue for in Paris. I’d never felt so tempted, not even by Fran’s cocaine back in the day.
‘Rain’s stopped,’ he told me. ‘Been shit all month.’
He sat down at the table. The parts of a shotgun lay on a cloth in front of him, with oil and rags to clean them. He wore blue work trousers with a check shirt over the top. A blue jacket hung from a hook on the back door. His stomach was held in place by thick braces to keep his trousers up. He was unshaven, his cheeks and chin a darker blue than his clothes.
I joined him at the table. ‘Been bad here, has it?’
‘Told you. Been shit all month.’ Good to get that out of the way. ‘You asking about the Boches.’
Through the back window, I could see the sheds where I assumed the pigs lived. Beyond it, the trees stood in a line like an army in formation, threatening to overrun the farm. The sun was already sinking behind them. Young Fernand picked up a rag and gun part and started polishing it.
‘You were here when the fighting was on, I take it?’ He nodded. ‘What about our army? What do you remember of them?’
‘What do you mean? There was fighting. Our boys lost.’
‘Do you remember any African troops here?’
‘Some.’
‘Do you know what happened to them? After we lost? They were separated and taken prisoner. Do you know where they were taken?’
He waited before answering, concentrating on cleaning the locking pin on the shotgun. I thought for a moment he wasn’t going to say anything. I saw a flicker in his eyes.
‘Is that what you heard?’
‘What do you mean?’
The problem was the next thing we both heard was a banging on his front door. He jumped up, startled, his quick movement at odds with his bearing. In the same moment, two German soldiers appeared at the back door. They banged on it and demanded we open. The farmer looked angrily at me and went to open the front door. I let the two soldiers at the back door in. They pointed their rifles at me and made me back away.
Fernand reappeared in the kitchen, followed by a gefreiter and an officer, a hauptmann. The three soldiers looked through the kitchen and examined the shotgun parts on the table. Short and bespectacled, with the air of a city librarian, the hauptmann looked quizzically at me. By my clothes, it was obvious I wasn’t a farmer.
‘Papers,’ he ordered.
I handed him my police ID, which took him by surprise. ‘A Paris police officer. You are a long way from home. What are you doing here?’
‘I’m looking for a prisoner. He absconded from Paris. We had reports that he’d been seen here.’
‘In this farmhouse?’
‘No. In the area. I’m simply asking the local residents if they’ve seen anyone suspicious hanging around or if they’ve noticed anything stolen lately.’
The hauptmann turned to Fernand. ‘And have you?’
The farmer blanched. ‘No. I told him.’
‘You will come with us.’ That was in my direction.
They took me in their car while one of the gefreiters drove behind in mine. I sat next to the hauptmann, who told me his name was Prochnow, in the back of the big Horch vehicle. It was one of those high-sided jobs that made you feel like a kid in an over-sized sweater. It felt just as sweltering. A trickle of sweat ran down my back. I looked out at the trees darkening in the dusk, my mood matching the gathering darkness.
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘Compiègne.’
At the Wehrmacht garrison, they sat me down in a grey corridor outside Prochnow’s office and left me there to wait until a gefreiter finally took me in and sat me down opposite Prochnow. Without a word, he picked up my ID from his desk and studied it. I had no idea what he hoped to find on it that he hadn’t already discovered.
‘I’m a French policeman,’ I reminded him. ‘I demand to be allowed to return to Paris.’ I felt a lot less confident than I sounded.
He ignored my demand and laid the ID down on his desk with deliberate movements. ‘A missing prisoner, you say?’
I kicked myself for having used the word ‘prisoner’. I couldn’t change it now. ‘Yes. He was in our cells awaiting trial and he escaped when he was being taken to court. He’s dangerous, so I’ve been sent to find him. As you’ll appreciate, it’s difficult these days coordinating with local police officers.’
He called a clerk in and told them to look for the phone number of the police station in Paris.
‘I can give it to you,’ I told him.
He smiled. ‘I would prefer to find it for ourselves.’
After a few minutes, the phone on his desk rang to tell him the call had been put through. He eventually got through to someone in authority and asked who he was talking to. I was already working out how I was going to argue my way out of it, preparing myself for when whoever it was at the other end told Prochnow I wasn’t supposed to be there.
‘Detective Boniface,’ the hauptmann repeated.
I cursed silently. Prochnow explained very carefully that I was in Compiègne and asked if I was there to catch a missing prisoner. I waited on tenterhooks, wishing the call wouldn’t end, so I’d have time to come up with something.
It ended almost immediately. Boniface for once not talking as much as he should. Prochnow looked pleased.
‘Well, Inspector Giral, that all appears to be in order.’
‘It is?’
‘Yes. Your Detective Boniface was most helpful. He informed me that you have indeed been sent here to look for a missing criminal. I apologise for any inconvenience.’
I could only stare at him. Boniface’s ability to surprise yet again.
‘If that’s all, might I be allowed to leave now? It’s a two-hour drive to Paris.’
They let me go after another half-hour of taking down my details and filing them away in an ancient wooden filing cabinet.
‘The next time you come here, please inform the German authorities first. It will save a lot of trouble.’
‘I’ll be sure to do that,’ I promised.
One of the soldiers from the farm showed me to my car. I got in under his gaze and turned the ignition, trying to make a hurried job look natural and carefree. I fully expected a soldier to come running from the building to haul me back in before I’d got the chance to get away.
Outside Compiègne, I pulled over and sat in my car for a few moments, deep in thought about young Fernand and the trees beyond his farm. Despite the cold, I felt the sweat run down my back. Night had fallen, but provided I had a clear road, I’d be in good time to be back in Paris before the curfew. I wasn’t worried about Paris, I just didn’t want to be on the road after hours.
From my inside pocket, I took out the slice of ham from young Fernand’s kitchen. It had been sitting in there ever since I’d pinched it from his plate before the Germans had got there. Picking the fluff off it, I sat and ate it slowly. It tasted like nothing I’d experienced in at least a year.
30
I should have been worried about Paris.
Not Paris as such. She’s big enough to take care of herself. Most of the time. I meant the bit of Paris that had me in it. Especially since it seemed that everyone else was unduly worried about that bit too.
I picked up my first follower the moment I crossed the Seine and headed the short distance for home through the streets of the Fifth. It was a Peugeot, so I reckoned it was Hochstetter’s proxy fairy godmothers making sure I didn’t turn into a pumpkin. I let them be. There were still two hours to go until curfew but I was hungry and wanted to get home and they were unlikely to stop me. The drive back to the city from the Bois d’Eraine had been slow and mercifully uneventful, but the ham I’d borrowed from young Fernand had only kept off the pangs for about fifty kilometres, and right now I was ravenous. There was half a baguette with my name on it in the linen bag on the back of the kitchen door and a rasher of bacon in the cold box, so I wasn’t going to let the small matter of being followed by German military intelligence put me off my supper. My stomach rumbled as I recalled the taste of the ham in the woods outside Compiègne and my foot involuntarily pressed harder on the accelerator.
That’s when I got my second guard of honour. A Traction Avant. No fairy godmothers this time. It was waiting for me in my street, so I carried on driving, working out my next move and quelling my hunger pains. The Gestapo driver pulled out sharply in front of the Peugeot, so they were directly behind me, with the Abwehr reluctantly bringing up the rear. We made a fine caravan. My stomach growled noisily. Right now it was a caravanserai I needed. I looked in the mirror at the heavy cars trundling along behind me and pitied my poor little street. It wasn’t big enough for three cars at once. I was worried it’d sink under the weight.
I turned onto the Boulevard Saint-Germain and checked myself. Instinctively, I’d found myself heading for Rue Saint-Séverin and the narrow lane leading to the street behind my apartment block, but I’d stopped myself in time. It was my secret parking place, something I’d learned to do quite quickly after the start of the Occupation. I didn’t want to give that little hidey-hole away, and I’d nearly led them directly to it.
The Traction Avant was close enough behind me that I imagined I could hear its occupants’ breath. I checked the mirror. It seemed to me to be filled with the rugged acne of a hard man intent on catching up with me. I slowed at a junction and it bumped slightly into the back of me.
‘Touch my bottom again and I shall scream and scream,’ I mouthed at the driver in my mirror. Luckily, I don’t think he could reverse lip-read French.
I hung a right and entered the narrow streets behind the Sorbonne. I was moving further and further away from home. A few more right and left turns and I was on the incline leading up to the Panthéon. Not sure that was what I intended. I changed down a gear. More petrol I couldn’t afford. That and my own need for fuel were beginning to annoy me.
Another vehicle pulled out in front of me from a side road and stopped. I hadn’t seen it coming and had to brake hard to avoid hitting it. A German patrol car. I stopped and checked in my mirror, expecting my retinue to get out and come towards me. Instead, they waited patiently behind me in their cars. A feldwebel got out of the patrol car and flagged me down. A stabsgefreiter in the driver’s seat kept the motor running. I realised then it was just a routine patrol stopping me at random, nothing to do with my various devoted followers.
‘Well, I’m not going anywhere with you in the way, am I, sunbeam?’ I told him while he was still out of earshot.
He walked up to me and demanded to see my papers. I handed them to him through the open window and he looked closely at them. He had the myopic squint of a man too vain for glasses and a sharp lantern jaw you could slice ham with.
‘A policeman?’ he asked. ‘What is your business?’
‘On my way to see Major Hochstetter of the Abwehr.’ That seemed to impress him. I gestured surreptitiously at the cars behind me. ‘You might want to check up on those two. Been following me since my meeting with the SD.’
After a moment’s thought, he nodded and gave my ID a second examination before signalling to the patrol car. The stabsgefreiter moved it out of my way. The feldwebel gave my papers back and told me to move along. Not quite believing it, I started off up the road towards the Panthéon. As I passed, I saw the patrol car reverse back into the way of the Gestapo car. As calmly as I could, I accelerated away and turned down the first street to the right that I found. Before turning, I looked back at the Traction Avant being flagged down and grinned. I didn’t wave. Not even I’m that cocky.
I sped up and hurried through the small streets to the main road. Once the patrol realised the men in the car were Gestapo, they’d be out of their path faster than I could eat stolen ham, so I knew I didn’t have long to put any distance between me and them. I made it count, racing across junctions and cutting down the narrowest alleys the car would fit. Not for the first time, I thanked the lack of cars on the city streets.
Except now I was further away from home than ever. Cruising through Montparnasse, I realised my followers would simply go back to wait for me at my apartment building, so it was pointless trying to beat them to it. And if they really wanted to see me, they’d come knocking anyway. Not even the prospect of a measly rasher of bacon and day-old bread was going to make up for that.
‘Wait until they ration that,’ I told myself, my throat aching.
For some absurd reason, the thought made me laugh. Loud and hard like a false friend, until tears came. Silent now, and gulping in breaths of air, I sat down on the ground with my back to the car and stared out at a barren field, the crop either harvested or destroyed. I considered what I was doing, the calm of release from the city marshalling my ideas. By the time I stood up again and got behind the wheel, my thoughts were clearer.
Instead of turning back, though, I carried on my way. Leaving Paris further behind, my speed was now as steady and as constant as my determination. Not even a German patrol, on the outskirts of Senlis, could deter me. A jumpy stabsgefreiter in a forage cap and acne examined my police ID closely, but eventually waved me through. It was the brush with reality that I needed.
Checking my surroundings after the patrol, I realised I had to take it carefully from here to make sure I didn’t stray too far north. The Germans had designated a Forbidden Zone from the Swiss border stretching round in an arc to the Somme – the North-East Line, they called it – and I didn’t want to get too near and draw attention to myself. I doubted my police ID would do much to keep me out of trouble were I to cross it. I was crossing too many lines lately. I started looking for signs. There were none. I suppose I’d expected a big friendly billboard telling me I was on the right road. I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking for. I’d had to look it up the night before in my old school atlas. It wasn’t that helpful. Like it was a secret to be kept.
Plumping for a road that looked like it would lead me to where I wanted to go, I turned off the main road and found myself in a little place the size of a small street in Paris called Bailleul-le-Soc. At least there were trees.
I assumed it had to be the Bois d’Eraine.
29
I’d lived in Paris for too long. I was surrounded by farms and I had no idea what they farmed or what sort of thing they’d be doing this time of year. I stuck out like a pimp in a church hall. My hands were clean for one thing. Literally, at least, if not metaphorically.
Two houses stood together in their own tiny row separate from any other buildings. I saw no reason for their being there. I knocked on the door of the one on the right. It was opened by a wizened old guy with no teeth and a face tanned like an old chair. But then this was the country. He was probably younger than me.
‘Is this the Bois d’Eraine?’ I asked him.
He spat on the ground outside his front door and nodded. I shifted position just in case.
‘Is there a German garrison near here?’ I asked again. Just as well to get that out of the way.
That earned another spit on the ground, this one more emphatic.
‘Who wants to know?’ he asked me. I love country folk with their simple questions.
‘I do.’
‘You a flic? Or a German?’
‘Do I look German?’
‘A flic. What is it you want to know?’
This is where I had to start treading carefully.
‘Were you here when the fighting was on?’
‘Where else would I have been? Lived here all my life. Not moving now. Not for the Boches. Not for the Ministry.’
The way he said it, he obviously saw the Ministry, whichever one it was, as the greater enemy. I chose my words. ‘Were there any African troops here? In May or June?’
He spat a third time. It was getting tiresome. I longed for the mugs and thugs of Paris.
‘It’s young Fernand you want. Over that way. Two kilometres. Pig farm. Red roof.’ He spoke like he spat, a sort of scattergun eruption.
I returned to my car with a sense of eyes on me. The door to another house slammed shut as I drove past. The curtains in another twitched.
I found young Fernand without any trouble. It was a pig farm after all. I saw the red roofs at the end of a long lane long after the smell had lured me into its embrace.
Young Fernand opened the door before I was out of my car. ‘Young’ was evidently a relative term in these parts. He watched impassively as I trod warily through the steaming piles in his yard. The stench was overwhelming. I bet myself that the likelihood of my ruining my shoes was in direct proportion to footwear being the next thing to be rationed.
He gave me the country nod. It was used instead of wasteful luxuries like words to greet people. Just a single nod upwards, that was my lot.
‘You from the Ministry?’ he asked me.
‘Cop.’ I showed him my ID. ‘I take it the Ministry’s not popular around here?’ I still wondered which precise Ministry kept these people enraged at night.
‘You could say that.’
‘Can I come inside?’ I was trying to talk without opening my mouth to stop even more of the smell from getting in.
In response, he turned away, leaving the door open. I followed him into the kitchen. The warmth of the stove reminded me how cold the day had become outside. I stood by it, warming my hands. Next to the stove, a plate stood on the sink with a slice of ham on it that would have taken five hours to queue for in Paris. I’d never felt so tempted, not even by Fran’s cocaine back in the day.
‘Rain’s stopped,’ he told me. ‘Been shit all month.’
He sat down at the table. The parts of a shotgun lay on a cloth in front of him, with oil and rags to clean them. He wore blue work trousers with a check shirt over the top. A blue jacket hung from a hook on the back door. His stomach was held in place by thick braces to keep his trousers up. He was unshaven, his cheeks and chin a darker blue than his clothes.
I joined him at the table. ‘Been bad here, has it?’
‘Told you. Been shit all month.’ Good to get that out of the way. ‘You asking about the Boches.’
Through the back window, I could see the sheds where I assumed the pigs lived. Beyond it, the trees stood in a line like an army in formation, threatening to overrun the farm. The sun was already sinking behind them. Young Fernand picked up a rag and gun part and started polishing it.
‘You were here when the fighting was on, I take it?’ He nodded. ‘What about our army? What do you remember of them?’
‘What do you mean? There was fighting. Our boys lost.’
‘Do you remember any African troops here?’
‘Some.’
‘Do you know what happened to them? After we lost? They were separated and taken prisoner. Do you know where they were taken?’
He waited before answering, concentrating on cleaning the locking pin on the shotgun. I thought for a moment he wasn’t going to say anything. I saw a flicker in his eyes.
‘Is that what you heard?’
‘What do you mean?’
The problem was the next thing we both heard was a banging on his front door. He jumped up, startled, his quick movement at odds with his bearing. In the same moment, two German soldiers appeared at the back door. They banged on it and demanded we open. The farmer looked angrily at me and went to open the front door. I let the two soldiers at the back door in. They pointed their rifles at me and made me back away.
Fernand reappeared in the kitchen, followed by a gefreiter and an officer, a hauptmann. The three soldiers looked through the kitchen and examined the shotgun parts on the table. Short and bespectacled, with the air of a city librarian, the hauptmann looked quizzically at me. By my clothes, it was obvious I wasn’t a farmer.
‘Papers,’ he ordered.
I handed him my police ID, which took him by surprise. ‘A Paris police officer. You are a long way from home. What are you doing here?’
‘I’m looking for a prisoner. He absconded from Paris. We had reports that he’d been seen here.’
‘In this farmhouse?’
‘No. In the area. I’m simply asking the local residents if they’ve seen anyone suspicious hanging around or if they’ve noticed anything stolen lately.’
The hauptmann turned to Fernand. ‘And have you?’
The farmer blanched. ‘No. I told him.’
‘You will come with us.’ That was in my direction.
They took me in their car while one of the gefreiters drove behind in mine. I sat next to the hauptmann, who told me his name was Prochnow, in the back of the big Horch vehicle. It was one of those high-sided jobs that made you feel like a kid in an over-sized sweater. It felt just as sweltering. A trickle of sweat ran down my back. I looked out at the trees darkening in the dusk, my mood matching the gathering darkness.
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘Compiègne.’
At the Wehrmacht garrison, they sat me down in a grey corridor outside Prochnow’s office and left me there to wait until a gefreiter finally took me in and sat me down opposite Prochnow. Without a word, he picked up my ID from his desk and studied it. I had no idea what he hoped to find on it that he hadn’t already discovered.
‘I’m a French policeman,’ I reminded him. ‘I demand to be allowed to return to Paris.’ I felt a lot less confident than I sounded.
He ignored my demand and laid the ID down on his desk with deliberate movements. ‘A missing prisoner, you say?’
I kicked myself for having used the word ‘prisoner’. I couldn’t change it now. ‘Yes. He was in our cells awaiting trial and he escaped when he was being taken to court. He’s dangerous, so I’ve been sent to find him. As you’ll appreciate, it’s difficult these days coordinating with local police officers.’
He called a clerk in and told them to look for the phone number of the police station in Paris.
‘I can give it to you,’ I told him.
He smiled. ‘I would prefer to find it for ourselves.’
After a few minutes, the phone on his desk rang to tell him the call had been put through. He eventually got through to someone in authority and asked who he was talking to. I was already working out how I was going to argue my way out of it, preparing myself for when whoever it was at the other end told Prochnow I wasn’t supposed to be there.
‘Detective Boniface,’ the hauptmann repeated.
I cursed silently. Prochnow explained very carefully that I was in Compiègne and asked if I was there to catch a missing prisoner. I waited on tenterhooks, wishing the call wouldn’t end, so I’d have time to come up with something.
It ended almost immediately. Boniface for once not talking as much as he should. Prochnow looked pleased.
‘Well, Inspector Giral, that all appears to be in order.’
‘It is?’
‘Yes. Your Detective Boniface was most helpful. He informed me that you have indeed been sent here to look for a missing criminal. I apologise for any inconvenience.’
I could only stare at him. Boniface’s ability to surprise yet again.
‘If that’s all, might I be allowed to leave now? It’s a two-hour drive to Paris.’
They let me go after another half-hour of taking down my details and filing them away in an ancient wooden filing cabinet.
‘The next time you come here, please inform the German authorities first. It will save a lot of trouble.’
‘I’ll be sure to do that,’ I promised.
One of the soldiers from the farm showed me to my car. I got in under his gaze and turned the ignition, trying to make a hurried job look natural and carefree. I fully expected a soldier to come running from the building to haul me back in before I’d got the chance to get away.
Outside Compiègne, I pulled over and sat in my car for a few moments, deep in thought about young Fernand and the trees beyond his farm. Despite the cold, I felt the sweat run down my back. Night had fallen, but provided I had a clear road, I’d be in good time to be back in Paris before the curfew. I wasn’t worried about Paris, I just didn’t want to be on the road after hours.
From my inside pocket, I took out the slice of ham from young Fernand’s kitchen. It had been sitting in there ever since I’d pinched it from his plate before the Germans had got there. Picking the fluff off it, I sat and ate it slowly. It tasted like nothing I’d experienced in at least a year.
30
I should have been worried about Paris.
Not Paris as such. She’s big enough to take care of herself. Most of the time. I meant the bit of Paris that had me in it. Especially since it seemed that everyone else was unduly worried about that bit too.
I picked up my first follower the moment I crossed the Seine and headed the short distance for home through the streets of the Fifth. It was a Peugeot, so I reckoned it was Hochstetter’s proxy fairy godmothers making sure I didn’t turn into a pumpkin. I let them be. There were still two hours to go until curfew but I was hungry and wanted to get home and they were unlikely to stop me. The drive back to the city from the Bois d’Eraine had been slow and mercifully uneventful, but the ham I’d borrowed from young Fernand had only kept off the pangs for about fifty kilometres, and right now I was ravenous. There was half a baguette with my name on it in the linen bag on the back of the kitchen door and a rasher of bacon in the cold box, so I wasn’t going to let the small matter of being followed by German military intelligence put me off my supper. My stomach rumbled as I recalled the taste of the ham in the woods outside Compiègne and my foot involuntarily pressed harder on the accelerator.
That’s when I got my second guard of honour. A Traction Avant. No fairy godmothers this time. It was waiting for me in my street, so I carried on driving, working out my next move and quelling my hunger pains. The Gestapo driver pulled out sharply in front of the Peugeot, so they were directly behind me, with the Abwehr reluctantly bringing up the rear. We made a fine caravan. My stomach growled noisily. Right now it was a caravanserai I needed. I looked in the mirror at the heavy cars trundling along behind me and pitied my poor little street. It wasn’t big enough for three cars at once. I was worried it’d sink under the weight.
I turned onto the Boulevard Saint-Germain and checked myself. Instinctively, I’d found myself heading for Rue Saint-Séverin and the narrow lane leading to the street behind my apartment block, but I’d stopped myself in time. It was my secret parking place, something I’d learned to do quite quickly after the start of the Occupation. I didn’t want to give that little hidey-hole away, and I’d nearly led them directly to it.
The Traction Avant was close enough behind me that I imagined I could hear its occupants’ breath. I checked the mirror. It seemed to me to be filled with the rugged acne of a hard man intent on catching up with me. I slowed at a junction and it bumped slightly into the back of me.
‘Touch my bottom again and I shall scream and scream,’ I mouthed at the driver in my mirror. Luckily, I don’t think he could reverse lip-read French.
I hung a right and entered the narrow streets behind the Sorbonne. I was moving further and further away from home. A few more right and left turns and I was on the incline leading up to the Panthéon. Not sure that was what I intended. I changed down a gear. More petrol I couldn’t afford. That and my own need for fuel were beginning to annoy me.
Another vehicle pulled out in front of me from a side road and stopped. I hadn’t seen it coming and had to brake hard to avoid hitting it. A German patrol car. I stopped and checked in my mirror, expecting my retinue to get out and come towards me. Instead, they waited patiently behind me in their cars. A feldwebel got out of the patrol car and flagged me down. A stabsgefreiter in the driver’s seat kept the motor running. I realised then it was just a routine patrol stopping me at random, nothing to do with my various devoted followers.
‘Well, I’m not going anywhere with you in the way, am I, sunbeam?’ I told him while he was still out of earshot.
He walked up to me and demanded to see my papers. I handed them to him through the open window and he looked closely at them. He had the myopic squint of a man too vain for glasses and a sharp lantern jaw you could slice ham with.
‘A policeman?’ he asked. ‘What is your business?’
‘On my way to see Major Hochstetter of the Abwehr.’ That seemed to impress him. I gestured surreptitiously at the cars behind me. ‘You might want to check up on those two. Been following me since my meeting with the SD.’
After a moment’s thought, he nodded and gave my ID a second examination before signalling to the patrol car. The stabsgefreiter moved it out of my way. The feldwebel gave my papers back and told me to move along. Not quite believing it, I started off up the road towards the Panthéon. As I passed, I saw the patrol car reverse back into the way of the Gestapo car. As calmly as I could, I accelerated away and turned down the first street to the right that I found. Before turning, I looked back at the Traction Avant being flagged down and grinned. I didn’t wave. Not even I’m that cocky.
I sped up and hurried through the small streets to the main road. Once the patrol realised the men in the car were Gestapo, they’d be out of their path faster than I could eat stolen ham, so I knew I didn’t have long to put any distance between me and them. I made it count, racing across junctions and cutting down the narrowest alleys the car would fit. Not for the first time, I thanked the lack of cars on the city streets.
Except now I was further away from home than ever. Cruising through Montparnasse, I realised my followers would simply go back to wait for me at my apartment building, so it was pointless trying to beat them to it. And if they really wanted to see me, they’d come knocking anyway. Not even the prospect of a measly rasher of bacon and day-old bread was going to make up for that.
