I can only say that he was far too useful to Göring and all the others. For him, we had simply ceased to exist-finished, just like that. Puff! And up the stack. Perhaps he even had an apéritif with some new woman.
He’s married again. Her voice over the telephone sounded young and excited, only to become distraught at a strange woman asking for her husband. Jealousy is so instant in the young, especially when one is in love. Me, I pity her. He must be running around with someone else, and already she’s beginning to notice his absences.
They have a flat in Auteuil, on the rue Boileau. Very posh, very handy to everything, the quays along the Seine, the Bois de Boulogne, et cetera, and a baby girl who is three months old. Is he any better as a father?
From time to time, he pauses to tidy his hair and brush off the jacket’s sleeves. When it’s back to digging again, I have to wonder where the others are.
Making a wide circuit through the forest, I see that André’s car is gone. They’ve split up, but it’s a trap. It has to be. That’s the way Schiller and Dupuis would work, but have they left the car down the road a piece? Are they now walking back, the one well ahead of the other?
In spite of this, I take a chance. It’s only a short distance from the coach house diagonally across the drive and into what was once the ground-floor study of my husband’s father. Voices come to me as I step inside-Vuitton and then that sharp-tongued wife of his. They’re in the kitchen.
‘The lieutenant is right, Louis. We can’t stay bottled up here waiting for that salope to come to us. He and Dupuis were right to go out and hunt her down before she kills us.’
‘And what then, my dear Dominique?’
He’s so dry about it all.
‘We’ll have to deal with him first and then Dupuis. You know that as well as I.’
‘Perhaps that Sûreté can be persuaded to help us. With Schiller out of the way, we can …’
‘Jules shouldn’t be out there alone like that. She’ll …’
‘My dear Dominique, is it that you’re still worried about the life of our protégé? Of what earthly use is he to us now?’
‘The three of us must stick together, Louis. The lieutenant … I’ve seen the way he looks at Jules and ourselves.’
‘As does Dupuis. Her killing de Verville can only have helped them, but perhaps we’ll be lucky, perhaps she’ll finish off the two of them and we can negotiate with her ourselves. She can’t be entirely unreasonable when she finds out about all of those who are still with us.’
‘Fool! She’s insane. She’ll strike when we least expect!’
Their voices rise and fall. From where I’m standing in the corridor, I can just see a sleeve of Vuitton’s coat through the splintered boards of the doorjamb but does he have a gun in that hand?
‘Let’s go together to Jules, Louis,’ says that Nefertiti. ‘Don’t leave me alone in this house.’
‘Jules will be all right. Lily won’t kill him.’
‘Ah, mon Dieu, me, I’m not hearing this! How can you say such a thing?’
Vuitton gives a snort of derision. ‘Because he knows what happened to their children, and she’ll have to hear it from his lips alone. Now please try to calm yourself while I have a look around.’
‘I’ll go and stay with Jules. Someone should.’
‘You’ll stay here where I can find you.’
‘I’ll go up to the library then. From up there, I can watch the road.’
Vuitton is tired of her nervousness and exhales a, ‘Very well, do as you like. You always have.’
The sleeve moves, and I hear him step out into the courtyard.
Fastidiously, Nefertiti picks her way through the house and up the stairs, and I watch as she reaches the landing but doesn’t look back.
When I come to the library, I find her crouched among the books that are littered everywhere, but what does she search for? Answers to what must happen? Portents of the future, wisdom from the past?
Very quickly, she tires of it and stands to one side of an empty window, gazing out over the drive to the road beyond. She has a little pistol clutched tightly in her right hand. The high coat collar frames the piled up, jet-black hair where pins and skewers of beaten gold and carnelian hold it in place.
This one had my children killed-I know she did. There was fighting, that tragic, terrible sound of guns. I heard Jean-Guy cry out to someone, ‘There’s my mother! Yes, there!’
I heard Marie screaming, ‘Jean-Guy, please don’t! Maman … Maman, they are going to kill you!’
Marie could think only of me, even at such a time. ‘Madame Vuitton, I’ve come to execute you in the name of the Résistance. Please do not attempt to turn around or cry out.’
Not a muscle moves as I place the Luger’s muzzle against the back of her neck. ‘Now drop the gun, madame, and I’ll give you a moment to ask God for forgiveness.’
The seconds pass, and it’s really far too quiet. Just the two of us, eh, and the musty smell of books.
‘Fool, my husband is right behind you.’
In an instant, I see him grinning at me, he having used his wife as bait, but one slug tears off his lower jaw and the other slams into his chest and throws him back into the corridor.
And her little gun has jammed, or so she thinks. She can’t believe it hasn’t fired. Finally, I hear myself saying, ‘So, madame, luck is with me yet again, eh? Now please allow me. It’s simply the safety catch. This one, that’s right next to your thumb, you have to push it up.’
She begs, pleads, cries at me, and backs away until she gives a startled scream, and I hear the sound as she hits the steps below.
Exhaustion comes. It’s always swift after a killing. One feels totally drained, but I know Jules is out there and will have heard the shots, as may Schiller and Dupuis yet, for a moment, I can only stand and listen to the house, to its silence and the fragments of memory.
Her body lies sprawled on the steps. Blood drains from her broken head. Vuitton is very dead, but I can’t take the chance. One slug for him and two for her. I’m just like Schiller. I’ve crawled right back down into the cesspool with him and all the others, and this I don’t like about myself. For this, as for so many other things, I am ashamed.
Making my way carefully downstairs, I step over her body and leave the house to my husband. I know I must remember how it was back then, that only in my doing so is there salvation, and that before I die I must confess everything.
Now, where did I leave off remembering? Ah bon, that autumn of 1941 and my sister’s request that I recruit men to help us. Yes … yes, that’s where I was but did I tell you we were to rob a German train? Can you imagine such a thing? A mother with two kids? A woman in love, warm, sensitive still, one even willing to forget and to forgive so long as she could escape with her children.
What an idiot I was.
There are some rocks, a place to hide, and I’m near the tower, but won’t go up there yet. Too many memories, too much feeling.
Clateau … Yes, yes, I’ll start with Clateau, the butcher, and the loft above his slaughterhouse in Barbizon. It was full of tobacco smoke. I was the only woman present, and it was very late. Well after curfew. I’d ridden my bicycle all the way there through the pouring rain and was still freezing.
There were seven of us sitting around the table on which a single lantern burned among half-empty bottles of Armagnac. Four of the men were from Melun-distrustful guys who’d just as soon cut our throats. Two worked for the railways, a third was with the police, and the last a pious schoolteacher. Two Communists, one Socialist, and one Radical Socialist. Ah, mon Dieu, it was quite a combination. All were over the age of fifty, and all of them knew that, if caught, they’d be shot and their families and closest relatives taken, the women sent into forced labour, the men, from the age of eighteen on, held hostage until needed to atone for the actions of other résistants, the children sent to reform schools in the Reich or to the camps.