His back is to me. The toe of a brown Oxford nudges the rusty crowbar I used to break in, and he can’t understand why anyone would do such a thing when entry has been so easy for him.
Puzzled, he fingers the broken sash of the door as he looks out through the orchard, only to then pick his way over the glass. Soon, he’s looking at the remains of the potting shed where I used to meet Tommy and other members of our réseau. Is he putting it all together? Has he been told to look for this shed?
He must have some familiarity with the orchard, for he makes a careful circuit of my vegetable plots that are now so overgrown they almost look as if they’ve never been used. Is he looking for unmarked graves or my recent footprints?
Waiting, I hear the guns, the cries of my friends and comrades, the bursts of a Schmeisser, the single shots from a Walther P38 as I see them kneeling on that very ground, those that are left. They have dug their own graves, and as Schiller, tall and arrogant in his SS uniform, stands behind each, he raises his pistol for the Genickschuss.
Only that’s all gone now, and soon this man stands beneath one of my apple trees looking up curiously at the frayed end of the rope that hangs from a sturdy branch.
He’s tall enough to touch the end of it and does. Hunching his shoulders against the cold and damp, he again heads for the house only to walk round the side and out to the road. Me, I could so easily have killed him.
* Curfew times were often changed at will, though generally settled down to the above.
6
They’ll come for me now. Probably, like him, they’ll leave their car some distance, will split up, for he’ll have told them I’m here. One will nudge that front door open, another the back with one in reserve. I had better do the unexpected.
In the kitchen, there’s a German ordnance map. I fish it out, tear off a strip, search for the stub of a pencil and in big, black letters print: ATTENDEZ! JE VAIS REVENIR. (Wait! I’ll return.)
This I nail to the front door with the tines of a carving fork. Then I sign it, Lily Hollis, and disappear back into the house to wait for them.
Always there’s that night in my thoughts, and I’m walking the streets of Paris knowing there’s no price like that of my innocence. Jules had warned me not to try to contact my sister. Me, I was so green I had let them follow me.
Like fireflies in the darkness, the bicycles passed by. Occasionally, at the corners of the streets, there were faint blue-washed lights. Otherwise, there was only the night above and the shapes, the silhouettes, the sounds of hesitant steps.
Hurrying across the boulevard Edgar Quinet, I frantically tried the main gate to the Cimetière du Montparnasse. It was the best of places to disappear into during the day, the final home of so many, of statues, angels, griffins, and hobgoblins, too. A city in itself, its crowded stones rose constantly upon one another in a jumble of darkened crosses to the length of the wall that would shut me off from the avenue de l’Ouest if I could but get over it, but it was impossible of course! At six p.m., they locked up the dead, and that was it. I barked my shins but made no more noise as he lit a cigarette. It was Dupuis and he was standing nearby, but did he want me to see him? Each time he took a drag, the cigarette glowed, and all I had of him was this and the dumpy silhouette.
Something fluttered past, terrifying me-a bat, who knows-and Dupuis moved calmly away to search elsewhere, leaving that cigarette for me to find burning on the edge of the kerb.
Dupuis … He was so clever, that one.
Later … but a few moments later, I was at Marcel’s. The woman was naked and clutching the bedclothes to hide herself, the boy asleep on the floor beside the bed, curled up like a little dog. There were black, curly hairs on the barrel of Marcel’s chest, and it was easy for me to see that he had the hanging fruit of the well endowed as he rasped, ‘Jésus, merde alors, Lily, what is this?’
I switched off my torch. ‘I have to talk to you about Janine and the others.’
‘Idiote, it’s well after curfew! In any case, what are you doing in Paris?’
The woman sank down and pulled the covers up over her head. ‘Don’t wake the boy.’ That’s all she said. Marcel reached for his shirt and trousers, and together we moved away to look out at the night, down the length of that courtyard towards the rue de l’Ouest. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I don’t know where your sister and the others are. I think Dmitry stole a van and picked them up just before the invasion, but I’ve told no one of it until now.’
That only made me suspicious of him. The flat reeked of oil paints, turpentine, and other things, like a vase de nuit that needed emptying. ‘Jules could give you lots of money now. Why don’t you go to him?’
‘Never. It’s not pride, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘Then what is it?’
‘Look, it doesn’t matter, eh? Some things are best left alone.’
‘The Vuittons?’
‘They’ll be after you, too. They want Jules to be completely free of past associations.’
‘Could Nini have made it to the zone libre? She’d go to Provence, to mother’s. They could have holed up there. Damn it, Marcel, she’s not mixed up in anything is she?’
‘Résistance leaflets, newspapers? Me, I simply don’t know.’
‘If not the Free Zone, then where?’
His shoulders lifted. ‘The farm perhaps, but they’ll be watching it. Jules will have told them to.’
Tommy and Nicki would have made very careful circuits of it. ‘Can you get someone into Paris for me?’
Assessing me through the darkness, he hazarded, ‘Peut-être. I still have a few contacts.’
‘In the black market?’
‘In that and other things. When would you want this person to be moved?’
He now knew that someone could well be at the farmhouse so there was no sense in my hiding it. ‘Three days from now. He’ll be there, but well hidden.’
‘Is he a British airman? Janine could be in that business, Lily. For myself, I’ve thought it entirely possible but, again, I’ve said this to no one but yourself.’
How kind of him! ‘So why not keep it from me, too?’
‘Because I choose not to in spite of the risk.’
‘How much will it cost me to have someone moved?’
‘Five thousand francs-half in advance, but make it some place deep in the forest. Near the buttes perhaps.’
Why had he suggested such a place? ‘Must it be there?
‘Certainly, because Schiller and the others will think you would never go there again. Now push off before that concierge of mine calls in those neither of us want.’
Again, the city awaited, and I didn’t really know if I’d ever make it because Simone and André de Verville lived in a posh block of flats on the boulevard de Beauséjour not a stone’s throw from the Bois de Boulogne and me, I arrived in the dead of night. They were frantic, of course.
‘You what?’ snapped André.
‘I’ve ridden here. I stole a bicycle. It’s outside, so you’d better bring it in and hide it. I’ll take it home with me tomorrow.’
He tore his hair and gestured at the idiocy. ‘Lily, you can’t be doing things like this. You promised.’
He had warned me earlier, at his consulting room. ‘But I didn’t realize they would have me followed. Dupuis and the others slowed me up.’
‘That Sûreté? Well now you know what it’s like. I just hope no one saw you coming here except for Laforge, our concierge, who will be lecturing me first thing in the morning!’