Early One Morning (28 page)

Robert spun round. ‘And you let them do it?’

‘It isn’t a matter of letting them or otherwise, Monsieur Benoist,’ she replied with surprising passion. ‘Not with the SS. Your mother was very brave.’

He turned back to the bed. ‘But why?’

‘They had Maurice with them. Don’t blame him. You’d have done the same.’

‘Done what? Done what, Mother?’

‘Please, he had no choice but to tell them.’

Robert felt the colour drain from his face and he laid her back on to the pillow as gently as he could, his arms shaking with the tension of not lashing out at something to vent the anger he felt building. He turned to the sister. ‘I need a telephone.
Now
.’

W
ILLIAMS WOKE WITH
a slightly thick head. Rather than transport the by-now meagrely stocked wine cellar of Auffargis they had decided to try to drink it. He, Eve, Robert and Jean-Pierre Wimille had got through far too many bottles. Wimille had finally volunteered to join Chestnut full time. Like many other Frenchmen, he was now beginning to think sabotage and subversion wasn’t all pissing in the wind. With the Allies ready to take on the Italian mainland, perhaps they really could make a difference.

Eve had told them about Maurice’s chummy exchange with Keppler, which she had heard from within the café. ‘If you dance with the devil, sooner or later he gets to call the tune,’ Williams had slurred enigmatically at this point.

Still, they were moving now. New house, fresh start, time to regroup. Wimille was sleeping it off across the hall. He was to help them move essential belongings to the new house Robert had chosen near Houdan, but he and Robert had carried on drinking after Eve and Williams had excused themselves to go and make lazy, drunken love and fallen asleep entwined. He untangled her arms from him, slipped out of bed and poured himself a large tumbler of water.

‘Good morning, Mister Super-lover,’ she said.

He glanced over to see if she was being sarcastic.

‘I’m serious. You should drink two bottles of wine more often.’

He threw the dregs of water at her and she squealed and dived under the covers. He pulled on trousers and a shirt. ‘I’ll get the coffee.’

He went downstairs, shaking his head, checking the physical damage of their late night, holding out his splayed fingers at arm’s length, examining them for tremors. Not too bad. The house smelled, though, of stale cigarette smoke and vinegary wine. Chiquita, the maid, was already up trying to clean up the mess.

‘Morning,’ he said.

She nodded back with a smile.

‘Robert up?’

‘Monsieur Benoist has gone to Paris. See his mother at the clinic. Left very early.’

Williams walked over to the window and looked out across the lawn to the stand of trees that formed the edge of the forest. He thought about the men out there somewhere, scattered across the thousands of hectares, waking stiffly after another night in the open, quietly seething about what had become of them, vagabonds in their own country.

The phone rang and Chiquita went to get it. He looked back at the woods one more time, and was halfway through turning to take the call when his brain finally put together what the early morning sun had caught at the very edge of the tree line, his cerebrum magnifying it until he could see the air-cooling holes around the barrel.

Chiquita had picked up the phone. ‘Hello?’

‘Get down!’ Williams yelled as he dropped to the floor, but it was too late. The heavy machine-gun slugs ripped into Chiquita’s body and flung her back against the wall, sending big spurts of her blood across the rough white surface. The window imploded, showering him with glass and he shuffled to press his back against the heavy outside wall, feeling it shake and shudder as round after round blasted it, splintering the terrace, and he imagined the dancing rose petals torn from the trellis, floating on clouds of brick- and sawdust.

Even above the sustained racket of bullets he heard something upstairs. Wimille. He hoped he had the sense to get out the back. There were bicycles, a motor bike, places to hide. He also hoped he took Eve.

The upstairs window blew out as the gunners started to rake the rest of the building, and through the open doorway he saw Eve rolling down the stairs, falling into a heap at the bottom as the banisters and rails flowered into raw shards.

‘Eve. Eve.’

She began to move, slowly at first, then quickly on all fours, ignoring the glass and debris that sliced through the flesh of her hands and knees, heading for him.

‘Stay back. Stay down.’

More bullets hammered into the wall and through the window, zinging as they went, smaller calibre now, rifles and Schmeisser fire. Eve reached him and crawled up his body until she was level with his face. ‘Always say goodbye. Isn’t that what Robert used to say?’

The gunfire stopped, leaving their ears buzzing angrily after the onslaught they had suffered. Some crockery items fell lazily to the floor, smashing into pieces. Williams brushed the hair away from Eve’s face. ‘No more goodbyes.’

Then he heard the rumble of the half-track coming up the drive.

Keppler’s blue Opel led the way. He was in the back seat with Maurice, who stared at the floor, ashamed even to set eyes on the house. In the front was Neumann, whose idea the fusillade had been. He was convinced that if this Chestnut circuit did have all the arms that Maurice had suggested, there was a good chance they might use them. Best soften them up first. Behind the Opel was a half-track with a contingent of troops to mop up the pieces.

They slewed to a halt outside the house and the soldiers were out and inside within a few well-drilled seconds. Good men. SS men. Not like some of the scum arriving these days, thought Keppler. Romanians, Croatians, Hungarians, all pouring in to defend the Atlantic wall from whatever it was the Allies were up to this summer. Something, that was for sure.

Keppler stepped out of the car and glanced down at Maurice. He wasn’t moving. Neumann was already out, picking his way around the destroyed Renault van, collapsed on its frame after the machine guns had reduced the body to a metal mesh, across the ruined terrace and into the house.

Soldiers were breaking those big flower urns that hadn’t been shattered by the gunfire, and every so often guns, explosives and timing sticks would fall out. A concrete trough yielded an intact parachute container, full of Stens and ammunition.

Keppler walked around the side to the barn-cum-garage which he had ordered not be targeted and threw open the doors. Empty. No Bugatti. He stifled the disappointment. This wasn’t about such booty, this was about breaking a spy circuit, he reminded himself. He slammed the doors shut. Owning an Atlantic, one of just three ever made, that would be a bonus, though.

Williams and Eve were dragged out on to the terrace, where they were thrown down on the torn boards, the soldiers aiming machine pistols at their heads. Both glared at Keppler with hate, until Williams spotted Maurice in the car and his jaw began to work, clenching and unclenching, his teeth grinding noisily.

Williams wasn’t scared now. This was like just before a race. He had to stay calm, detached. Every time he let that clutch in, he was embarking on a journey that could end in pain or injury or death. Now he was doing it again. And he had training to fall back on. But Eve. Please, God. Not Eve. If they laid a finger on Eve he’d make sure Maurice died, one way or another.

‘Just these two and one dead girl, sir,’ said the sergeant. So Wimille had made it.

As the man talked he heard a clink. The Bugatti key and chain had slipped from Eve’s neck and fallen down through the cracks in the terrace. She’d undone it. She winked at him and he thought his heart was going to explode.

‘No Robert Benoist or Jean-Pierre Wimille?’ asked Keppler.

A smiling Neumann emerged with a gramophone and a stack of records. ‘A miracle. Not one broken.’ He proceeded to load it into the boot of the Opel. ‘So the brother has flown the coop?’ Neumann asked Keppler.

Keppler strode up and stared down at the pair, and signalled them to be dragged to their feet. ‘No,’ he said as ominously as he could to Williams’ face. ‘Not exactly.’

Robert listened to it all. Chiquita had picked up the telephone, he had heard her greeting and then that sound. At first he had thought it was interference on the line, a common enough occurrence these days, but then it resolved itself into the sound of a room, a house suffering a holocaust of gunfire. And some masochistic part of his brain, some evil primitive part, made him hold the phone to his ear for what seemed like hours, flinching as he heard the detonations and destructions and imagined what those bullets were doing to the flesh of his friends. To Eve.

With exaggerated care he put the phone back on its cradle and slumped in the chair at the nurses’ station, putting his head in his hands. For a moment he began to cry, then caught himself.

‘Are you all right?’ asked the sister. ‘Can I get you anything?’

Robert sat up, blinked, and took a deep breath. From his jacket he took a Browning pistol and checked the action, much to the young nurse’s horror. ‘Yes. Please. A glass of water.’

Robert gulped it back, dragged a forearm across his mouth and stood, his emotions in check again, all but for that bright, white spot of anger burning near his heart. Keep in there, he reminded himself, feed off it. The brighter it glowed, the easier this would be. ‘Tell my mother I’ll be back.’

He retraced his steps down to the entrance and stepped outside, hesitating for a second at the top of the steps. The first cosh hit him a glancing blow on the shoulder and he spun around, reaching for the Browning. The second caught him on the bridge of the nose, blinding out daylight with its wash of pain, and a third and fourth sent him crumpling down the stone steps into oblivion.

T
HE POLICE CITROËN
van came screeching from where it had skulked round the corner and the two gendarmes rushed down the steps after Robert and pulled the dazed man to his feet. Blood streaked his face from his contact with the rough stone, and, thanks to the lead-filled coshes, bruises more florid than his mother’s were already blossoming across his face.

A brusque search revealed Robert’s gun, which the gendarme called Didier slotted into his belt. He opened the rear doors of the van and with the help of Farnoux, his partner, they flung Robert in the back of the paddy wagon, stepped after him and banged the sides to tell the driver to go. Siren blaring it headed north, from Republique, heading through the heart of the city, skirting the Les Halles markets, on its way to the Arc de Triomphe, and, ultimately, the deceptive grandeur of Avenue Foch.

Robert pulled himself up slowly, scrabbling for some kind of hold as the van swung this way and that. There were no benches or seats of any sort for prisoners, just some worn leather straps hanging from the roof and metal rings for attaching handcuffs. Painfully he slid himself up the bulkhead and managed to hold on.

The two policemen dangled at the far ends, like experts, swaying with the rhythm of the Citroën. Farnoux pulled a small folding metal seat down from the wall and perched on it. Didier looked the wild-eyed, blood-stained prisoner up and down. ‘That’s just for starters, Monsieur Big Shot,’ he said, and grinned.

Robert examined Didier’s bulging gut, and the Browning stuffed against it, and wondered how much the man weighed. More than he should as a police officer in these austere times, that was for sure. Himself and Didier probably made one-eighty, maybe even two hundred kilos. Robert waited until the van slowed, probably working its way around a velo or a horse-drawn cart or a knot of pedestrians—with only light traffic, people wandered into the road with impunity these days.

Robert already knew the man in the cab’s clumsy driving style. He would jerk away from a near standstill and accelerate furiously until the poor engine ran out of steam, then brake with an equally heavy foot as soon as he saw some obstacle. He waited, letting his weight pull on the strap, trying to look suitably beaten and cowed. They mustn’t notice. They mustn’t realise. Until the moment came.

It came with an unexpected judder and screech of tyres, even though he had tried to anticipate the lumpen responses of the driver, and he hit the bulkhead with a painful thud. Using the momentum, Robert bounced back as the van picked up speed again and pumped all his energy into the two or three strides he would have before they finally cottoned on to the fact that, in the heady flush of a successful apprehension, they had forgotten to handcuff him.

He saw the shock in the faces as he came down the length of the van at them, the desperate scrabble for the gun holsters, Farnoux trying to rise from the seat and then Robert hit Didier like a sack of bricks, throwing all his mass straight into the gendarme’s chest, their combined weight punching open the unsecured lock on the rear doors and sending them as one diving out on to the road.

Robert was on top when they hit the ground with a bone-jarring crunch and he felt the air explode out of Didier, ribs straining and snapping as his full weight drove the man into the road surface. Already he could hear shouting and banging as Farnoux screamed at the driver to stop. As he pulled himself up Robert jerked the Browning pistol free from the belt and levelled it at Didier.

Didier, sweating with the knifing pain in his sides and breathing hard and shallow, looked up in terror and began to push with his boot heels, crawling on his back to get away from the figure standing over him with the pistol, the man who looked as if he might just be crazy enough to kill a cop. The gun was rock steady, tracing his movements as he cockroached backwards.

‘Please,’ Didier gasped. ‘I am only doing my job.’

Robert’s eyes glanced down at a uniform defiled and degraded by what the
flics
had done for their masters over the last few years. He thought of those pathetic, heartbreaking little notes from the train, the swaggering cops banging on cattle trucks telling the starving, thirsty inhabitants to keep quiet.

‘And I’m only doing mine,’ said Robert softly before he shot him twice in the heart.