Rue des Saussaies. It was no surprise. There’d been a hint of it earlier, and she’d heard the SS man to whom she’d again been handcuffed give the order to the one who drove. Clausen had sent for them, giving brusque orders in German over the telephone, and she’d made nothing of that; he’d transmogrified into the stony-faced interrogator again by then – ex-interrogator, disinterested in her now the interview had been concluded, case wrapped up. She’d tried a sally or two and got nowhere, might as well have been talking to herself. Even in regard to Jacqui, who having featured so largely in their exchanges didn’t come into it now and – she supposed – didn’t have to. He’d got everything he wanted – truly had, she realised soon enough, having wishfully thought at first that maybe this was just an act. It hadn’t been: he’d barely glanced up when the SS had come to take her off his hands.
She’d wondered whether the road-blocks would still be there, but they weren’t, the truck hadn’t even slowed: swinging to the right out of Place Beauvau, then slowing in its approach to number eleven. She’d been guessing at the route they’d been following – going by the turns and visualising the map: Avenue Marigny into Place Beauvau, she’d imagined. She’d been on the floor of the truck with her right arm raised uncomfortably, joined at the wrist to her SS companion’s; there’d been another of them beside him and two facing them. Plus the two in front, making six; two of the original eight must have been sent off to get their heads down. The last time she’d travelled on the floor of a truck like this one had been after the débâcle at Ardouval near Bellencombre, the Lysander rendezvous which Clausen had mentioned. That truck journey had been all the way from Ardouval back into Rouen, and to pass the time they’d given her a few kicks.
Slowing. One wheel clipping the kerb as they turned into the courtyard and the two nearer the tailboard crouched over it, preparing to let it down.
Might run into Georges, Patrice and company?
She thought probably not. In that telephone call in which Clausen had shown little interest at first – and to which she hadn’t paid very close attention because she’d been at a point of crisis in fielding his questions – the number 34 had been mentioned, which was approximately the number of Georges’ group, whom they’d been holding here. This hadn’t occurred to her until the next bit. Clausen saying yes, he’d have one female for them in about an hour; her guess being then that 34 prisoners had been moved out, so they had room for her.
Obligatory report to him, she guessed. To whom it might concern. An earlier inquiry maybe, if he’d been wondering where to put her. But by ‘moved out’, meaning released?
Hardly, at this time of night. Send 34 men out into the streets with the curfew in force?
Being consigned to 11 Rue des Saussaies would normally have been a depressing and frightening prospect. But as the alternative to being put straight on to a train for Ravensbrück – or Fürstenburg, which was the station for Ravensbrück – which she might have been, in which case they’d have dumped her under guard at Gare de l’Est. Where Georges had worked…
‘Raus!’
Yanking her out, the iron bracelet biting into her wrist. Stumbling: one of them grabbing her arm, holding her up. A torch shone in her face. There were Miliciens all over the place, uniformly attired in breeches and boots, khaki shirts with black ties, black berets, pistols in holsters on their belts. Darnand’s devotees – one of their better-known slogans being Against Jewish Leprosy and for French Purity! French purity, for God’s sake. Come-uppances by the bucketful were long overdue, she thought: seeing their youthful faces and the hatred in them as they glared back at her. Her people, these – her father’s people: French…
This woman wasn’t, though. If it was a woman – as the bulge of breasts did indicate. Bulge of biceps too, and black hairs on her chin. What looked like a policeman’s truncheon hung from her belt. Thick trousered legs apart, thumbs hooked over the belt – waiting just inside, in the entrance hall – the SS man hurrying Rosie in with him and this creature looking her up and down contemptuously: Rosie in her old raincoat, hair unkempt, on her feet the felt slippers she’d been wearing in the Dog for comfort. The SS escort had taken the handcuff off her; he gave the woman a card on which Clausen had scribbled some notes – essentially, she guessed, her name and the charge against her.
Or – Don’t bother to keep this one alive?
‘Jeanne-Marie Lefèvre…’
She nodded. She would also have admitted to being Suzanne Tanguy or Justine Quérier: submission and compliance being the thing in this place. She’d seen the woman before, she realised: on her previous visit – June, if that was when it had been. Recently as that? She’d thought of her, she remembered, as ‘the weight-lifter’. Another one – taller, scraggier – was coming now from the direction of where Rosie remembered the stairs were, remembered being dragged up them to an office where she’d been left for a long time strapped to a chair before being interrogated and, being non-compliant in the provision of answers to the man’s questions, whipped.
A couple of months ago, was all.
The new one, who had one of the smallest heads Rosie had ever seen on a grown person, asked a question in German, to which the muscular one replied, ‘Englander’ and added some further piece of information, after which the tall one said to Rosie in passable French, ‘Won’t have you with us long, then.’
‘Why d’you say that?’
‘Death sentences are not carried out in this building, that’s why.’ The weight-lifter cut in: ‘Down there. Move it!’ Rosie knew the way, shuffled in her slippers towards the head of the basement steps; the one with the head like a chicken’s calling after her, ‘You’ll love it down there, I bet!’ It was a joke, apparently – and even at the top of the downward curve of steps it was obvious what she thought was funny. The stink. Sharply, eye-wateringly ammoniac. Having to continue down into it though, step by step, with heavy grunting breaths from the thickset one who was following close behind with a torch-beam lighting the way ahead. Passing a level bit where on Rosie’s last visit there’d been a guard with a machine-pistol – as well as a man behind her with a rifle, who’d used its stock to drive her along in front of him. In relation to which the cosh on this woman’s belt wasn’t there only for decoration either, one knew she’d use it if she felt so inclined or if one gave her any lip or opposed her in any way. While if she, Rosie, was the only prisoner here, with Miliciens outside and only these two Gestapo creatures on the inside – and their knowing she was for the chop in any case…
She thought she might be, too. That Clausen had simply tricked her into telling him what she’d come for, and that was that – her card was marked. He’d told her he hadn’t ever set eyes on Léonie/Yvette or Rouquet/Derek Courtland; perhaps he wouldn’t have to set eyes on her again either.
The cement floor of the big cellar was slippery with urine. And not only urine. Her felt slippers would be soaking it up. She half-turned, gesturing around with one hand in the torch-light: ‘Why – like this?’
You didn’t want to breathe. Didn’t expect an answer either, at least not a civil one, but surprisingly did get one – in clumsy, heavily accented French: ‘Pigs. Many, many. Toilettes blocked also. Men – résistants. Pigs!’
One of the words she happened to know…
‘Have you released them now?’
‘Huh?’
‘The pigs – résistants – you’ve let them go?’
‘Let go?’ A burst of laughter. ‘Ja – let go!’ That was a real joke: she’d laughed again. They’d passed through the cellar now, were at the iron gate that led to an area off which there were individual cells. It wasn’t locked – had no one on that side of it of course – and Rosie pushed it open. The woman telling her in that tortured French of hers, ‘Not let go – never. Not for you go!’ Staring at her fixedly with the torch-beam in her face: Rosie having stopped and turned to face her, awaiting instructions as to which of the cells was hers: ‘You – here – before – uh?’
She nodded. ‘Two months ago.’
Otherwise – if she’d denied it, and there was some record in which the creature could have looked it up, she’d maybe have earned a beating. The woman asked, still with the torch on her – ‘So – was let you go?’
Meaning presumably Did we let you go? Rosie shook her head. ‘Uh-huh.’
‘Huh.’ A nod: as if that said it all, proved her point, everything was as it should be. Muttering to herself in German as she dragged the left-hand cell door open and shone her torch inside: swinging it back on Rosie then – stopping her in the doorway, Rosie having tried to move in quickly past her, to give her no excuse to throw her in: or – whatever else… She’d noticed with some relief that the cement floor looked dry, had a slope to it – she’d forgotten that – that the iron bed was as she remembered it but the foul-looking straw pallet was maybe a stage or two worse. There was a bare bulb – unlit of course – in a wire cage on the ceiling. The Gestapo woman’s stocky figure filled the doorway now, shutting out that glimpse of luxury; short, thick arm coming up, thick, short-fingered hand patting Rosie’s cheek: ‘Pretty. Very pretty!’
She’d pulled back, physically unable to stand there and accept it: but aware that too violent a reaction, positive resistance, would only make it worse.
‘Ach! Ça!’
Her watch. Actually Marilyn’s watch. She’d been surprised that Dubarque or the SS hadn’t taken it when they’d roughly searched her in the anteroom to Clausen’s office. Reacting to that gesture of affection, admiration or lust, she’d jerked her hand up to her face and the raincoat’s sleeve must have fallen back, uncovering it – and this creature wanted it, had the torch on it. Rosie took it off, held it out to her: next moment had been sent spinning into the cell, the door clumping shut behind her. Total darkness…
She’d kept the raincoat on. Had deliberated whether to do that or spread it like a ground-sheet on the mattress – or rather pallet. Had decided that keeping it on would be best: she’d had to lie down, even though the pallet was damp, stained and smelly, and having it on and wrapped tightly round her with the collar turned up did ensure that much protection; whereas if she’d lain on it and moved around much in her sleep it might have slid out from under her or become rucked up. There’d be lice in the straw, she guessed. Not wanting to have her hair in contact with the pallet – especially not wanting that – she lay on her back with her hands linked under the back of her head. Nothing like adequate protection, but some. After a while the position imposed a certain strain, but it was really the only way to lie and she made herself put up with it. She’d sleep all right, she thought: it had been a long, tiring day. The bike tour with Nico, the climb to Sacré Coeur and the incident in the Place du Tertre, long evening in the Dog and to cap it all the exhausting two-hour session with Clausen: only when it finished had she realised how exhausting that had been.
Exhaustion might have been a major factor, she thought, in her state of depression and uncertainty as to what was going to happen next. Whether this was the end, at any rate in his intention was the end – end of her – allowing him to keep his brilliant reputation untarnished, while getting rid of her as an unwanted and possibly dangerous loose cannon in the next week or few days while he was making his plans for Jacqui. If indeed he was making plans for her – at any rate plans that were as clearly in her interests as she believed.
If she did, as devoutly as she’d let it seem. In the restaurant on Saturday there’d been some hesitance when Rosie had questioned how strongly he felt about her: then as to whether he might take her back to Germany with him she’d said, ‘Possible but unlikely’ – suggesting it might be on the cards, although when they’d been together next day it had been clear that it was not.
Proving what? Well – only that there were doubts where one would not have expected any. Doubts heightened now through his not having jumped at the offer she’d made him – virtually a guarantee of Jacqui’s safety.
If he was as concerned for her as he said he was, wouldn’t he have fairly leapt at it?
Faint greyish light was spreading across the concrete ceiling. She remembered from last time a small, barred window high up in her cell’s end wall – that one. If this was the same cell, which it might be, the grating on the outside would be at about ground level, must provide some small circulation of air in here which in the big cellar there would not be. Thinking of Georges, Patrice and thirty-two others in there: standing or squatting room only, probably called out one by one for interrogation. Then with that process completed, passed on to – execution, or a cattle-truck eastward from Gare de l’Est? The former, probably: at Montrouge, Mont St Valerian or the castle at Vincennes, the centres of hostage-slaughter. Simply to get rid of them would be the thing. Some truce, she thought. In pitch darkness and the latrine stench and one’s own condition generally, one saw it as nothing but stark reality, how it was…
She could make out that ventilator now, just – the small rectangle of grey and the dark pattern of the bars. Dawn light – on Tuesday August 22nd: tonight, Leblanc and/or his ex-military colleague would be attacking the Milice armoury. Which, please God, would be successful. Then Wednesday, when she didn’t turn up to meet him at the Dog—
But they’d know, of course, would have heard well before then from Adée. And might decide to go ahead without her?
That thought about Clausen again: if he’d had any real interest in her offer to take Jacqui to England, wouldn’t he have enthused about it, there and then?
He’d shown interest, but in a detached sort of way, not as one would have expected, more as if his real interest had been in the fact of her having made the offer, and her own motivation – why those two, Léonie and Rouquet, so especially? In reply to which – questions, comments starting with Quite exceptionally important to you, they must be – she’d said nothing about their special knowledge of FFI and/or Maquis dispositions in Alsace-Lorraine – in case that hadn’t registered, despite Cazalet’s report to SIS; she’d only told him that Yvette and Derek were friends of hers, that she owed them for help they’d given her at some earlier time, was in any case personally concerned for them, and she had persuaded the hierarchy in London to let her have a go – banking on her friendship with Jacqui and the generally confused state of affairs, approaching climax, here in Paris.
‘You mean try to help them escape somehow?’
‘Delay their being sent east. Yes. And what I’m asking you now – the deal I’m offering—’
‘Yes. Yes, of course…’
Straight-faced, but she thought maybe laughing at her. Half-smiling anyway – rather smug self-satisfaction, in retrospect, as he’d replaced those two files in the drawer, glanced at the clock and double-checked on his own watch; that hand then moving on to rest for a moment beside the telephone, its fingers drumming… ‘So that’s about it, eh? Unless there’s anything else you’d like to tell me?’
He’d been clever on Sunday, she thought. Having had answers from Berlin that morning and knowing already that she was an agent of SOE, but giving her no reason to suspect he knew it. On his guard to the extent that he would have been anyway, even without that knowledge – being what he was, and she to all intents and purposes a stranger – but acting it cleverly, entertaining her with tag-ends of what might have been privileged information – in fact wasn’t, but might have lulled her into thinking he was accepting her as Jacqui’s friend in whom he could to that extent confide. The stuff about General Choltitz for instance, and the Lafont background – admitting his personal dislike of ‘Monsieur Henri’, all that.
Actually she couldn’t imagine him and Lafont as buddies. Especially with the Jacqui complication. Which rather strangely he’d shrugged off. Assumed the leopard had changed its spots? That she’d changed them for him, no doubt: the lover she’d always wanted and never found. Except she had – and switched to the colonel of engineers. But maybe had very little choice, especially as he must have connived in it. She’d told Rosie on Saturday, I’m pro Gerhardt Clausen and pro me: his business is his own, my business is him. She’d have fed him that line. Might even have meant it. But if all that was mutually on the up-and-up – here we go again – wouldn’t he have grabbed with both hands at the offer of sanctuary in England for her?
Theory-time. Exercise the imagination time. Think up some explanation that might improve morale, give grounds for hope. Lying still in the lavatorial-scented darkness, watching the slow spread of the coming day up there, guessing at the time – perhaps 4 am, 4.30 – and wishing that creature hadn’t taken her watch – which was luminous, would have been something of a companion, ticking away and glowing green… Clausen, though – a cold fish, by the nature of his job, must live to a large extent inside his own skull—
Hang on…
One possible answer coming through. Whether it might be that – well, his side of the deal would mean producing Léonie/Yvette and Derek – obviously. What if he wasn’t certain he’d be able to, if he might have to look into ways and means before he could take it any further? He’d said – surprisingly – ‘I never set eyes on either of them’ – which did suggest that Boemelbourg’s intentions might either have been misreported or overtaken by events.
Conceivable?
No. Didn’t match his manner in the closing stages, that slightly contemptuous, ‘Anything else you’d like to tell me?’ All that fitted any of it – words, tone of voice, switching-off of interest – was that he’d got all he wanted out of her and would be taking care of Jacqui in some way he’d work out for himself.
She was woken by the scrape of the key in the lock of her cell door, then the squeak of its hinges as it was pulled open. She knew immediately where she was and all the circumstances of her being there; in the three or four seconds it took for the door to open she was wondering – guessing – Gestapo woman – Clausen – SS coming for her?
The first guess had been right. The tall, chicken-headed one: electric torch in one hand, tin mug in the other. Something else in that hand too, pressed against the mug. A bun? Oh – lump of bread – of a kind she remembered – technically speaking black bread, actually grey, with a musty taste and odour. Pinhead had put it and the mug on a shelf at that door end of the cell.
‘Breakfast.’
‘Thank you. May I ask, what is the time?’
‘Gone eight. Want visit toilette?’
‘Yes – please…’
Torch-beam travelling around, touching here and there. In fact one could have seen one’s way around without it now, by the seepage of light from the barred aperture high in the end wall. Pinhead had the torch in her left hand, and having the other one free now had jerked a stick or something from her belt. Riding-crop. Bone handle, silver band: Rosie saw it in close-up as she edged out past her. ‘Thank you.’
You had to be polite to them. Stupid not to be. All you got, if you weren’t, was beaten: and – as she’d thought before – if the whole place was empty, the freaks not answerable to anyone…
‘To your left!’
‘I know. Thank you.’
The toilette was as appalling as she’d expected. By anything like normal standards, wasn’t usable. One tried not to breathe. The woman waited with the torch shining in, her shape framed in the doorway like some great bird, possibly prehistoric. Tall, small-headed, straight-sided, exceptionally long feet.
‘Quick, you!’
Wasn’t taking any longer than she had to. Wasn’t exactly longing to get back to her cell either, although of the two – yes, that was preferable. But only performing the essentials while breathing as shallowly as possible and taking – well, great care: needing the light from the torch in that respect, while avoiding that unwavering stare. Eyes like some sort of bird’s too: they’d look at anything without blinking. Rosie asked her as they passed through that end of the big urine-stinking cellar again, ‘This place was full until last night, did your colleague say?’
‘Résistants. Criminals.’
‘Big crowd of them?’
‘It was full, God’s sake—’
‘She doesn’t speak much French, does she, wasn’t easy to understand. I think she said they moved them to some other prison.’
Turning right where the barred door stood open: dampness squeezing through the slippers and up between her toes. At the door of her own cell now though, on dryish cement again; glancing round. ‘A different prison?’
‘In.’ A poke with the crop; then as she moved on in: ‘Gestapo of Rue Lauriston taking them. What’s it matter to you?’
‘Well. Wondering how long I’ll be here.’
‘Not long. Tell you that – because we leaving too.’ A catarrhal snort. ‘You to your peloton d’exécution, we home Bavaria. Eat breakfast, maybe last you get.’ Backing out, the torchlight withdrawing with her and cut off with the thud of the door, leaving Rosie to grope for the lump of coarse bread and the tin mug – which contained about a third of a pint of some sort of gruel, thin and lukewarm but still better than nothing.
Peloton d’exécution in that context meaning a firing-squad, presumably.
All day now, she supposed. Her eyes were accustoming themselves to the semi-darkness again. She wished to God she still had her watch.
All day. Dozing a little and trying to dream of Ben. Thinking for maybe the four-hundred-and-ninetieth time about how it would be when the war was finished, these bastards back in their own country, not bloody goose-stepping all over Europe and England too as they’d planned and had expected. Ben had told her about that, having seen a translation of captured printed orders which had been issued to the German 9th and 16th Armies for the invasion and occupation of Great Britain, including mention of an SS extermination outfit which would have had its headquarters in London and gas-chamber units, Einsatzgruppen, in specified locations across the country. There’d been details such as setting one up at the southern end of the Forth Bridge, unless the bridge had been destroyed in the course of the invasion, in which case another would be needed to the north of it. Ben had pointed out, over drinks in a bar-restaurant called the Wellington, in Knightsbridge, ‘Won’t happen now because whether or not they know it we’ve got ’em licked. But for instance – every male between seventeen and forty-five to be sent to slave labour over there. How about that? I tell you – you marvellous, marvellous object, you – any time between now and eternity I set eyes on one I’ll have in mind how it would have gone if they’d had us licked!’
It was about then that she’d said, ‘Do let’s move to Australia, when it’s over?’
He’d talked about it before, as something they might do together. There’d been some Australian government scheme announced, an offer to ex-servicemen of grants of land which if the grantee had cleared of scrub within a certain time he’d then be entitled to another vast adjoining slab of territory: end up (he’d told her) with a spread about the size of – hell, Kent or Sussex. He’d been attracted to the idea, only doubtful as to how she’d take to what would be a rough life, comparative isolation and so forth. She’d told him she thought she’d take to it like a duck to water – above all, of course, with him.
But with his gammy leg now? Clearing hundreds of square miles of bush – and being stuck with it then no matter how the old leg reacted?
Well – if he was fit to have been sent back to sea now, maybe…
She spent a lot of the time pacing up and down her cell, also did press-ups and sit-ups and running-on-the-spot. Pinhead came about twelve hours after her morning visit, bringing a supper that was every bit as good as breakfast, and allowed her another outing to the toilette.
Midnight, roughly. In fact it must have been at about this stage that she’d lost her sense of time – effectively, lost a whole day. Whether either Pinhead or the gorilla had missed a visit or even two, or whether she’d gone through it as an automaton, like sleep-walking – weird enough, but actually the more likely, since otherwise she’d surely have been even hungrier than she was, missing two of those great meals – anyway, she came to realise afterwards that she must have been thinking of this being Tuesday night when actually it was Wednesday. Wondering about Leblanc and – what was his name, the ex-soldier – Leblanc had mentioned it… No doubt of it though, she’d been thinking about them as if it was tonight they’d be raiding the Milice armoury, tomorrow night maybe attacking the Rue de la Pompe house.
Fernagut was the man’s name. Not bad, Rosie – seeing that Leblanc only mentioned it that one time. But how would they go about it, she wondered. More exercise for the brain – for the imagination anyway. A strongish force, ten or twenty men, say – well-armed, if last night’s raid on the armoury had been successful. If it hadn’t, she guessed, they’d be sitting tight. But assuming they’d got the Schmeissers and grenades – smash in, using all they had, or break in softly-softly like burglars?
Visualising it: remembering that road and the cream-coloured house, only having to picture it now in darkness. There might be just a sliver of moon but maybe not, maybe not risen yet, she thought. Might even be moonless – would be, somewhere about now: it had been full on the night before the attack on the factory in St Valéry, and that had been – the ninth of this month. In which case the dark period would start tomorrow night, you’d need to allow for some moon now – worse luck. Whether in any case it would light the front of the house – the ground inside that shrubbery behind the railings… You wouldn’t get in that far unseen anyway – there’d surely be a guard or two. Approach might be possible from the back, although the gestapists would have taken care of that as well – if they’d even considered the possibility of being attacked. Anyway – if one had had to plan it oneself, here and now, on as little as one knew or could guess: OK, a truckload of at least a dozen men, say. With automatic weapons, obviously. In by the gate which if it wasn’t open you’d either smash through with the truck or have a couple of them drop off to open it – giving them covering fire from the truck if necessary – then rush either the front door and/or windows or the side or back door – or all of them if there were enough of you – smashing in with axes or sledge-hammers, but anyway making it so fast and furious they wouldn’t get time to kill their prisoners.
From a front bedroom window in number 107 Nico watched the house, which from this angle when the small remnants of a moon showed as it was doing intermittently through slow-moving cloud – there’d been rain earlier, might well be more coming – was in dark silhouette against it, the house’s moon-shadow reaching all the way to the gravelled entrance drive and the gate across it. The gate was shut, as it had been when Nico had stopped to fix his brakes on Monday. It was 12.20 now: Thursday. Zero-hour 12.30, in ten minutes. No guard on the gate anyway, as there had been then. There’d been one individual moving around, but Nico hadn’t seen him in the past half-hour. It would be very convenient if they’d withdrawn him, called him inside to join a card-game or something. Nico was standing well back from the sash window, but had it open so he could hear as well as see; old Vignot had opened it for him hours ago, in daylight, everything natural and above-board, a window opened on a hot afternoon by the owner of the house, no one across the road there sharp-eyed or bright enough to notice that it had still been open at nightfall. It was draughty in the house since the wind had got up, and the old boy had groused a bit about it. But he was a good sort, they’d been lucky with him. How it had come about was that Nico had said, when Leblanc and Fernagut had been conferring in the Dog this morning, ‘If we had access to one of the places opposite, wouldn’t be so bad. See what comes and goes, get an idea of the numbers we’ll be up against?’
‘Boy’s damn right.’ Fernagut, former sergeant-major. Nico turning pink with pleasure as Fernagut told Leblanc, ‘We’d find one we could use, too, bet your life. With a choice of say these five, that’d be close enough?’ They had a map spread on the table. Fernagut continuing, ‘Since every son of a bitch in Paris is calling himself a résistant now – needing only one out of five?’
Vignot’s had been the third they’d tried – Fernagut himself and Nico with him, the old soldier simultaneously making his own recce of the surroundings. Ostensibly, if challenged, he was in the business of buying antique furniture at knockdown prices. At the first house the woman was stone-deaf and wouldn’t let them in, and it mightn’t have been too healthy having to bawl your head off on a doorstep right opposite the Bonny-Lafont establishment; at the second no one came to the door, and at the third they’d found old Vignot, a dapper octogenarian who’d had some managerial position at Longchamp, loathed the occupants of that house as much as he detested Boches and had expressed delight at being allowed to help.
He was on the stairs now, in easy calling distance from Nico’s position in the bedroom, had his telephone with him at the full length of its flex from where it was plugged in, in the hall. He also had a torch and the ’phone number of a house two blocks away where Fernagut was waiting inside and a truck with fifteen men in it was parked with its gazo engine chugging in an alleyway beside it. In any emergency Nico would call Fernagut, otherwise Fernagut would call and check before he got going at 25 minutes past the hour.
Getting close to that time now. Vignot calling, ‘Still all quiet, lad?’
‘Yes. How long now?’
‘Three minutes. I suppose you’ll—’
‘Hang on.’
Lights – powerful torches. The guard had had one when he’d been there, and there’d been light visible in some windows from time to time, but most of the blinds were drawn – and nobody had come out with torches as they were doing now. Rumble of artillery then, on the wind from the south-west. Nico and his host had been listening to it earlier and speculating about the hoped-for arrival of the Americans. He wasn’t listening to it now though – instead, to the sound of some heavy vehicle approaching from the direction of Avenue Foch.
Definitely coming this way. A petrol engine.
‘Monsieur Vignot – call him up please, say wait, don’t move!’
‘Oh, my…’
You could see the truck now – flicking masked headlights approaching from the right. Not necessarily coming here – there – but with virtually no other traffic in the past couple of hours, and a lot of activity over there now – men, torches, voices, a whole crowd of them milling round suddenly: and they were opening the gate…
Evacuating?
‘Tell him something’s definitely happening, don’t move!’
Vignot had Fernagut on the line: ‘He says to wait, monsieur, not to move. Apparently there is – activity, of some kind.’
The gate was open and one of them was out on the pavement signalling to the approaching truck. Big, a three-tonner, dark-coloured: turning in off the road, lumbering up through the open gateway and the crowd inside there surging towards it. Those with torches, as Nico made it out, were herding others – who had their hands up. The truck’s tailgate crashed down, forming a ramp up which the prisoners were now being driven. He caught glimpses of Schmeissers, heard shouts and derisive laughter. He called to Vignot: ‘I’m coming. Tell him I’m coming, I’ll explain…’