Rudi Swartz wasn’t so bad. Left to guard crates of statues and paintings that he couldn’t have cared less about simply because he didn’t know or care about such things, he had quickly made himself useful. He was forty-two years old, watery-eyed, a dumpling of a man with a wife, two sons, and a daughter back home on the family farm near Rendsburg in Schleswig-Holstein. Jean-Guy and he communicated by gestures and occasional words in broken German or French. I knew that Rudi liked it at the château. If he had to be stationed anywhere, it was by far the best of postings. After Poland, it was paradise. He had seen things done there that he hadn’t liked.
And the others? I asked myself. The Oberst Gerhard Neumann, the colonel?
Neumann made me nervous. It wasn’t sexual, wasn’t life-threatening in any sort of way, it was just that he believed he belonged and that everything in the house, apart from the children and myself, would eventually be his.
The Lieutenant Johann Schiller was another matter. The scar down the left side of his face was one thing, his association with the Vuittons another, and his knowledge of myself, never admitted, yet another. I knew that he was in the SS because Nicki had told me this when I’d met him with Tommy, but because the army-the Wehrmacht-was in control of Occupied France and frowned on Himmler due to the excesses of the SS and the Gestapo in Poland and at home, Schiller had to be careful. As a result, he didn’t wear his SS uniform. Instead, he wore a Wehrmacht uniform and was ostensibly here as a forester. I think Oberst Neumann knew Schiller was SS, but he didn’t let on, just kept his distance and left well enough alone.
So Schiller came and went and drove my little car, and I had to, of course, provide him with his meals and do his laundry, just as for the colonel. Rudi I fed, but to his great credit, he did his own laundry, and often that of the other two.
I must have spent about twenty minutes at the tower. I didn’t want to leave. I found a pear in the pocket of my apron. Savouring each bite, I shut my eyes and let the tears come. Marie had loved pears. More than once, she had made herself sick on them. If only I hadn’t run from the car. If only …
Something made me stiffen. Not knowing whether to cry out or not, I waited.
‘Lily, don’t turn. There’s a man hiding among the rocks and pines below you. He’s about five hundred metres from the face of the cliff and the same to your left. Just finish your pear and pretend to go to sleep. We’ll meet you late tonight at the potting shed. If you can, let us have the key to your mother’s farmhouse, a few matches, a scarf, and an old blue denim jacket, money, too, and a gun, a pistol or revolver, if possible.’
I didn’t even think when Tommy asked for this last. Dmitry Alexandrov hadn’t come back to collect his little cache. For all I knew, he could have been killed. The Lebels would be safest for them if caught, the Luger I would keep, and though it’s now in my hand, though I’m standing in the courtyard behind the kitchen, leaning against the bricks, looking out through the orchard towards that shed, I can still hear Schiller saying to me, ‘You were out walking today, madame?’ as if it had only just happened.
As usual when the Oberst Neumann was away, the lieutenant ate alone in the main dining room, always by candlelight and always in Neumann’s chair. ‘Well?’ he demanded.
‘Is that a crime?’ I asked.
He waited for me to place his dinner before him. A chicken casserole, buttered squash, creamed leeks, and potatoes, nothing fancy.
‘Why should it be a crime?’ he asked. ‘The woods were particularly beautiful today. You went for acorns, the Gefreiter said?’
‘The squirrels must have taken them all.’
He gave a half-smile as he reached for the salt-always the salt first, even before tasting what was before him. ‘You could have had sacks of them.’
‘Can’t I just go for a walk?’
He tried the casserole, but I could seldom tell if it was to taste with him. The long fingers wrapped themselves around one of our air-twist glasses. He was drinking a Château Mouton, the 1923, had access to the cellar and helped himself, always writing the bottle down on the list so as to compensate my husband in Occupation marks or the new francs the Germans had insisted on, at twenty of the one to the other. And since the cash couldn’t be taken out of France or sent home anyway, the soldiers emptied the shops and sent those things instead. Neat, wasn’t it? The shortages at home were solved, and everyone kept happy since the French love to sell things.
‘A walk?’ he said, to remind me of it. ‘Of course, yet you don’t tell me the truth?’
The candlelight flickered on the scar that ran from the corner of the left eye to the chin, a glazed, long lens that accentuated the bluish shadow of well-shaven cheeks and the close-set deep blue eyes. ‘There was no attempt to lie, Herr Obersturmführer. I did intend to gather acorns to roast and grind for our coffee, but when I reached the tower, it was so lovely, and I was so very tired, I forgot about them.’
Of a deeper shade than Dmitry’s, his hair was the colour of ripened flax, cut short, parted on the left and brushed back to the right. ‘Admit it, madame, you were there to meet someone. A lover?’ he asked without a smirk or smile.
‘No one, Herr Obersturmführer.’
‘You must get lonely.’
‘I simply don’t think about such things.’
‘All women do, especially the attractive ones.’
‘Is everything to your satisfaction? If so, I’ll see that Herr Swartz is fed.’
‘Ach, our Gefreiter Swartz, yes, yes …’
I waited for him to finish what he’d been about to say, but he only shook his head. ‘It was nothing. You may go. Some coffee later, in the living room. You will join me then, Frau de St-Germain. I insist.’
Merde, but the salaud had put the needle in anyway! And, of course, he wouldn’t let go of the Frau business, not him. Exceedingly handsome, he was arrogant beyond words, ambitious, and totally without conscience, though I was only to discover this last with time.
A car passes by on the road near the house. I stand and wait. I hope, I pray it’s my husband and the rest of them, but the sound of it disappears in the direction of Arbonne. Dupuis will, of course, be back in Paris this morning. They’ll have a conference right away. Vuitton will tell him I’ve telephoned. That wife of his will insist that something be done. Jules … Jules will want to talk to me first and will refuse to understand that the past is everything for me.
None of them will think of André de Verville until the last possible moment. They’ll leave him to fret and think seriously about killing himself. Of all of them, he’s their weakest link, so there is a little more time.
I step back into the kitchen, try to remember how it was that night when Tommy and Nicki first came to me in the autumn of 1940.
The kitchen was all but in darkness. Firelight flickered from the draught in the firebox to touch the scar. Schiller’s grey-green Wehr-macht tunic was unbuttoned, the jackboots newly greased and polished. It was 2:03 a.m., and I had thought the house asleep, had forgotten entirely that I was to have had coffee with him earlier.
He was sitting there waiting for me with a tulip glass in hand. The Walther P38 he always carried lay on the floor beside the bottle: dark green and mould-encrusted glass against gun-metal blue and the warm brick red of the floor tiles. I couldn’t have known then, but now do, that the P38 9 mm is a very rugged and reliable weapon.