Juliette led her past the main door and into a side street. The Gestapo headquarters, a former hotel, faced onto the busy square near the train station, and every day the populace of Montluçon could see the officers in their SS uniforms, their black leather coats, welcoming in the town council members for meetings and briefings. The people watched them, and passed by as quickly as they could. Before the war, taxis and private cars dropped businessmen and tourists in front of the elegant portico, but their luggage as well as all the food and linen flowing in and out of the hotel was taken into the yard at the rear. Now it was via that yard the real business of the Gestapo happened—the vans rolling in at all times of the day and night, the guards ticking off lists as men, women and children, dumb with fear, were lifted down like livestock and hustled in through the old service doors and down into the cells.
And this way too came the pleasures the officers enjoyed—the luxury goods plucked from cellars, shops and abandoned villas, and the women. Four sentries guarded the gateway into the yard: two on raised platforms, which gave them a view of the yard itself and the road leading to it, and two others ready to lift the barrier and check the names on their lists. The sentry stared hard at Nancy, and she lowered her eyes, afraid he’d caught the flash of hatred in them. She could feel darkness in her blood and bones so poisonous she was sure she could kill this man with a touch of her fingertip.
“She’s not the usual girl,” the sentry said. “Captain Hesse normally likes them a bit plumper than this piece.”
Nancy felt his eyes slither over her.
“Sophie is sick,” Juliette said. She sounded bored, irritated. A born actress, Nancy thought, but then maybe whores had to be. “Captain Hesse said this girl would do. Now, you want to keep him waiting?”
The sentry shrugged and made a note on his logbook. “Chicken for the captain’s table,” it said.
Juliette was gone, back into the night at once. The sentry put out his hand, clicked his fingers and Nancy handed him her bag. He opened it. Lipstick. Scent. A couple of foil-wrapped condoms. Then he handed it back with a sniff and led her from the gate to the service door. Nancy wasn’t the first SOE officer to come this way. She thought about what she had heard of Maurice Southgate, the man captured just before she dropped into France. She thought of the two wireless operators who had disappeared through these doors into the fog and darkness at the same time and wondered if they were still alive somewhere in a camp. She thought of Henri and clenched her fists, driving her nails into her palms.
A noticeboard was bolted to the wall just inside the door. Nancy looked at it sideways, just long enough to see Fournier’s picture and her own, and the ridiculous money now being offered to deliver them to this very building. The sentry didn’t glance at it, just led her, thumping in his heavy boots, up the narrow service stairs and then out into the part of the building designed for the guests of the hotel, and now the officers. Heavy wood paneling was punctuated with huge mirrors and electric lights glowed under stained-glass shades. Nancy walked between an infinite number of images of herself. The sentry became an army and so did she, their footsteps now muffled by the thick carpets.
He pushed open a door, nodded her in with a sneer. Five men looked up from the table. None of them Böhm. Her instinct had been correct. He was pure SS and would never corrupt his flesh with a French whore. These men looked up at her with greedy surprise.
Another girl was already here, a blonde, sitting on the knee of an officer who didn’t look more than twenty, blushing to the tip of his ears as she caressed the back of his neck and wriggled a little on his lap, making the older men laugh.
The captain nearest Nancy reached out and put his arm around her waist, pulling her toward him, running his other hand over her breasts and down her front, then pushing his hand up her skirt, inserting a finger between the top of her stocking and the flesh of her thigh. He didn’t even look up at her face.
“Sweet stranger, how kind of Madame Juliette to give us something fresh.”
Nancy lifted the cap from his head and put it on, then leaned forward to kiss the top of his balding pate.
“Fresh and strong, sir,” she said breathily, pressing closer to him. His fingers strayed up to the cotton of her knickers and the other men chuckled. “Another drink?”
He let her move away to the side table where a carafe of red wine stood, surrounded by a dozen glasses. One of the other officers was growing impatient with the youth. He moved up his chair and began kissing the girl’s neck, kneading her breasts with his fat fingers while she giggled and groaned and squirmed on the boy’s lap. They were all red in the face, sweaty with building desire, impatient. They couldn’t take their eyes off the blonde.
Nancy poured the contents of her scent bottle into the wine and swilled it round in the decanter before filling the glasses and setting them on the table in front of each officer, then resumed her place next to her fat-fingered friend and lifting her own glass.
“The Führer!” she said. Even in their present state, their conditioning kicked in. Each man grabbed his glass, and raised it before drinking, repeating the toast, even if they couldn’t look away from the girl panting on the boy’s lap.
Nancy felt the wine touch her lips; aware of the urge to drink herself, take it down to the dregs, but resisting. Böhm was somewhere in this building, waiting for her.
All credit to the SOE, things happened very quickly now. Her fat-fingered friend began to pant, his hand to his throat. One of the others stood up, took two stumbling paces to the door, then fell onto the red and blue rug laid over the polished parquet and began to fit.
Nancy’s officer looked up at her face for the first time, his fleshy face registering shock, rage and finally, Nancy noticed with great satisfaction, recognition. He fumbled for his pistol, and Nancy didn’t even try to stop him, just pulled the commando knife from his belt and cut his throat.
The girl scrambled away into the corner of the room, too shocked to scream, covering her face with her hands. Nancy undid the belt from her officer, now slumped on the table in front of her, and did it up around her own waist. It sat on her hips like the belt of a western gunslinger. The boy was already dead. The last officer managed to raise his gun, but he was vomiting at the same time, and fell sideways onto the floor before he managed to squeeze off a shot.
Nancy stepped over his thrashing body and pulled back the curtains at the window and, with the light behind her, waved into the darkness. Not exactly a subtle signal, but it didn’t need to be.
The darkness, the void, had her now. It was Nietzsche these moronic sadistic shits liked, wasn’t it? That line, “If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you”? She’d always thought it sounded a bit weak, the sort of thing that drunk journalists said to each other in Parisian bars when they were boasting about all the dangerous men they had encountered. But she got it now. She was the abyss, she had drunk it into herself in those moments after she had shot Böhm’s spy, and now the abyss wasn’t just looking back at these mad men—it was coming to swallow them up.