‘The palais, yes. The Feldkommandant and his staff will be there, but that doesn’t mean she should lie to me. The matter will have to be gone into.’
How many times was I to hear him say that? ‘And their “association” with my sister?’
Has he waited for me to ask it? ‘Associates in a robbery, Frau de St-Germain. Apparently, some very valuable things have been stolen from one of the auctions at the Jeu de Paume. Your sister was reportedly seen there on several occasions, attempting to speak to your husband.’
‘So why not ask her?’
‘We are, and that is why I am interested in these “friends” of hers.’
A robbery.
‘So now you will tell me about this violinist who calls herself Michèle Chevalier.’
As if it was a nom de guerre. He would have checked her identity card, would have gone through all her papers, even her handbag …
Marie came into the room to tug at my ear and whisper closely, ‘There are noises, maman.’
‘You must excuse me, Lieutenant. Marie has to go potty.’
‘Maman …’
‘Ferme la, chérie!’ I gathered her up and headed for the door, and when he found us standing outside Collin’s, he looked along the corridor past us but didn’t say a thing, simply went downstairs, but let me hear him doing so.
Michèle was waiting for me in her room. ‘Lily, I told him I had been there with you, that just before the defeat we went there to see Nini and your mother. Neither Henri-Philippe or myself would have lied to him about that. We had no reason to.’
But Schiller now knew it was me who had just lied to him!
Again, Marie tugged at me and whispered, ‘Maman, monsieur le pilote, he has cried for you.’
‘And the robbery?’ I asked Michèle.
‘Four paintings. A Raphael, a Rubens, a Leonardo da Vinci, and an icon from the twelfth or thirteenth century. Something Byzantine.’
Nicki’s treasures. For me, for us, Collin Parker was just a prelude to what was to come.
There’s no sign of Dupuis and the others. Pink stucco, bullet holes, and broken shutters mar the château, but the sight of these hardly disturbs my remembering the call I made.
‘André, it’s Lily. Please, I’m sorry to telephone on the colonel’s line, but my problem has come back and I’m bleeding quite badly. Could you come at once? I … I have also burned myself on the stove.’ Burns, André. Please get the message.
The burn was on my left wrist. I had done it with the poker, had needed to have some way of telling him what was really up. I’d made myself a little bag of blood and had kept it in my pocket, and when I went in to ask the colonel if I could use his telephone, I broke that thing and let the blood run down the inside of my leg. Neumann had a green stomach when it came to women’s things. He was your usual Prussian. Tall, big, blue-eyed, a little over sixty, grey and bristly haired, a monocle, the whole bit, but absolutely ‘correct’ with the locals because in those early days of the Occupation he’d been ordered to be ‘correct’ with the French and he considered me to be one of them.
André came with his little black bag and worried look. Because he was in the SP, the Service-Public, he had the use of his car and a small petrol ration. He appeared at dusk, and we went quickly upstairs. Michèle and Henri-Philippe were preparing supper. Schiller was in the library with Neumann, both taking their leisure with cognac before the fire, and we ducked in so that André could say hello to them. To her great credit, Michèle saw the need and immediately began to play her violin, for Neumann was particularly fond of Schubert and she’d been an outstanding success in Fontainebleau.
Letting André, still in hat and coat, into that room, I waited. He took one look at Collin, swore at me under his breath-a thing I’d never heard him do-called me stupid and selfish, and grimly said to Collin, ‘You need to sleep. Let me give you some morphia.’ Nothing else. Not, How have you stood the pain? Not, How have you hung on for so long?
We watched, the three of us, as the morphia went into that vein. I think Collin thanked him. I know he wished me well, but to see a young man die like that, to see his life simply slip away …
‘Now you’ve got a problem of disposing of him,’ said André. ‘What you do is no concern of mine, Lily, so long as you do it well.’
We went into my room, and he made out a certificate for me, which said that I might possibly have a cancer of the womb. ‘That ought to keep them from throwing you into the internment camp or getting too close.’
The Germans feared cancer, syphilis, and tuberculosis most of all. ‘We’ll just have to see,’ he went on. ‘They may, of course, simply shoot you.’
I longed to ask him about the robbery. He pulled two newspapers out of his bag and handed them to me. ‘It was stupid, Lily. Stupid! What do those friends of yours think they’re doing?’
‘Just getting back what’s rightfully theirs.’
No one had been shot in the robbery-nothing like that. The paintings had simply been carried out by two workmen wearing the usual bleus de travail. ‘Cool-minded thieves,’ the press said, not Bolsheviks, not yet-the war with Russia was still to come, so the Nazi-controlled press couldn’t blame the Communists. Göring was, however, particularly upset, since he’d had his eye on the Raphael. Me, I had to wonder about the Vuittons, the Action française, and most particularly my husband, for he might have been blamed for having let the robbery happen.
But what do you do with a body in winter when you’ve only a wheelbarrow or children’s wagon and the enemy are all around you?
‘Rudi, could you to do a little favour for me?’
The breath steamed from him. He unslung a frozen Mauser and leaned it against the gatepost. ‘Madame Lily, it would be the greatest of pleasures. Please, you have only to ask.’
All this was in broken French, interspersed with German, our lingua franca. His brown eyes were rimmed with red, the lashes half-frozen. Beneath the angular helmet, which all but hid his eyes and gave no possible warmth, there was the grey woollen cap I’d knitted.
This dumpling of a Gefreiter was my friend from the other side-Ah, oui, oui, I must confess it and pay homage to him. A figure out of Brueghel, a man who never wanted to go to war.
He saw how pale and shaken I was. The strain of everything had taken its toll, and he was troubled by this, for I was at once his benefactor and escape.
‘Some of the meat the colonel very kindly bought for the Reichsmarschall’s visit is bad, Rudi. He got taken, of course, but I don’t want to embarrass him, you understand.’
‘Bad in this weather? Ach du liebe Zeit, Madame Lily, how could this be?’
Remember, please, that he was a farmer, his family from generations ago. ‘With this burn of mine, I can’t do much.’
He looked at the bandage I showed him beneath the sleeve of my coat. There was the wariness of the peasant in his gaze. To burn oneself like that was questionable, other things as well.
‘Help me to bury the meat, Rudi. Dig the hole for me.’ I was firm with him. After all, he knew he was onto a good thing by being stationed with us, knew also that he had looked the other way often enough and that should I be forced to confess this to the Obersturmführer Schiller, I might.
‘Where, madame? With this weather, the ground must be frozen.’
‘In the cellars, beneath the stones.’