The Tenth Chamber (35 page)

Ruac village formed its own maquis group, which was under the Resistance umbrella but loosely so. De Gaulle’s staff in Algeria tried to inject some order into the effort and assigned the code name Squad 70 to Bonnet’s gang and passed coded messages to them from time to time. In the dead of night, they would meet in their underground hideout where the mayor would preside and Dr Pelay would act as his deputy. Bonnet would always repeat: ‘These are our priorities: Ruac first, Ruac second, Ruac third.’ And one person would always draw a laugh by concluding, ‘And France fourth.’

Odile’s experience in the previous war put her in good stead with the maquisard and her father reluctantly allowed her to participate in some of their raids alongside her brother, Jacques. Both of them were strong and healthy, quick and athletic. And if Bonnet hadn’t given his permission, Odile would have run off and joined another maquis band anyway.

Bonnet and Dr Pelay made a good pair. Bonnet was a man of few words, but decisive. Pelay was more of a talker, and the people in the village knew that when they went to his surgery he’d chew their ear off. Their maquis soon had a reputation for effectiveness and complete ruthlessness. They were said to engage the
boche
with an almost superhuman ferocity and cruelty. Squad 70 was known to turn their Nazi victims into unrecognisable hunks of bloody flesh and the SS Panzer Division Das Reich, which was tasked with suppressing the Dordogne, feared this particular maquis group above all the others.

In one of their more notable escapades, Bonnet got it in his head that his band would be responsible for the retaliation for a massacre of French civilians from the nearby village of Saint-Julian. A Panzer unit had surrounded the town looking for maquis elements suspected to be hiding in the surrounding forests. All the men in the village were rounded up and gathered into the grounds of the village school. Information on collaborators was demanded. When none was given, all seventeen men, including a fourteen-year-old boy holding his father’s hand, were executed with bullets to the back of their heads.

Two weeks later, a group of eighty-two Germans were captured by the maquisard fifty kilometres west of Bergerac and were transported en masse to the Davoust Military Barracks in Bergerac, a Resistance stronghold.

On a Sunday, Bonnet and Pelay entered the barracks and under false pretenses took seventeen German prisoners from their cells. They were loaded into trucks driven by men from Ruac who snarled and verbally tortured their prisoners with what was going to happen to them during the trip from Bergerac to Saint-Julian.

By the time the Germans were assembled in the same schoolyard where the civilians had been massacred, the prisoners knew their fate and were incontinent with terror. The presence of Odile, a pretty woman, did nothing for their spirits because she was, like the men, wielding a long-handled axe. Bonnet personally addressed the condemned men, raging at them for their crimes and told them they were going to suffer before they died.

And in an orgy of axe blows, starting with arms and legs, all seventeen men were summarily hacked to death.

Word eventually came to Bonnet that Squad 70 had attracted the attention of the leadership of the Free French Army and General de Gaulle himself. A personal audience was desired. Bonnet hated to travel. He sent Dr Pelay to Algiers and the man spent a giddy time being feted by the co-presidents of the French Committee of National Liberation, Generals de Gaulle and Henri Giraud, who lauded the work of the Ruac Squad, the fiercest of the maquisard in France.

Pelay came back with a medal, which Odile thought ought to go to her father, but instead Pelay wore it proudly on his vest every day of his life.

In July 1944 Bonnet and Pelay disappeared for a week to liaise with a group of maquisard commanders in Lyon and when they returned they informed the group of a big action planned for the night of 26 July. If all went well, a lot of
boche
would be killed and a lot of money could be made.

First Bonnet told them what their role in the attack was supposed to be.

Then he told them what they’d be doing instead.

Odile and the Ruac gang hid in the woods by the railway track. To this day she remembered the pounding in her chest as the train approached. It was only early evening, still light. She and everyone would have preferred the cover of darkness but they had no control over Nazi train schedules.

Ahead, sixty kilos of picratol had been placed under an aqueduct. The Ruac squad had one machine gun and two automatic rifles among them. Everyone else, including Odile, had pistols. Hers was a Polish Vis, an old nine-millimetre handgun that jammed with regularity. Her father and brother had grenades.

The locomotive, on its way from Lyon to Bordeaux, passed their position and Odile started counting box cars. She got to five when the explosion ripped through the locomotive. The train came to a macabre halt, cars buckling against each other. A sliding door opened in front of their position and a trio of dazed German soldiers, bruised and confused from the impact, stared into her eyes. She began to fire her entire eight-shot magazine at them from no more than ten paces. She saw her bullets strike home and felt a frisson of excitement each time an exit wound splashed blood.

She heard her father say, ‘Good work.’

The Ruac squad secured the last two box cars while other bands hit the front cars. The plan was to offload all the contents to heavy lorries standing at a lay-by which would transfer the loot to Resistance headquarters in Lyon.

Bonnet had other ideas. The Ruac box cars were filled with bank notes, gold bars and one thin crate stencilled with a provocative notation:
FOR DELIVERY TO
R
EICHSMARSCHALL
G
OERING.

He and Pelay lobbed grenades into the woods to give the impression there was a pitched battle going on at the rear. In the confusion, every blood-spattered box and crate from those two cars found their way to transport vans driven by members of the Ruac maquis.

In under half an hour, all the loot was in Ruac, the Resistance leadership none the wiser.

In their underground chamber, Bonnet took a crowbar to the crate and splintered the plywood. Inside was a painting. A beautiful pale-faced young man draped in fur.

‘Fat-arsed Goering wanted this,’ Bonnet announced spreading his arms wide, holding it up to the villagers. ‘Probably worth a lot. Here, Odile, this is for you, a pretty boy for you to look at. You earned this tonight.’

She instantly fell in love with the portrait. She didn’t care if it was valuable or not. The young man in the painting was hers now. She’d put it on the wall over her kitchen table to have breakfast, lunch and dinner with him.

He
was
a pretty boy.

By the light of bare bulbs, they counted the cash and stacked the gold bars into the night. Giddy with victory and drink they listened to Bonnet’s final tally, which he punctuated with the following proclamation: ‘There’s enough here to set us all up for life.’ He raised his glass. ‘My friends and family, here’s to long lives!’

It was after one in the morning. Despite the endless day, Luc wasn’t tired. Numb, but not tired. The woman he was staring at was one hundred and sixteen years old. But she looked sultry and supple, like a dishy forty-year-old.

‘Since the war, we’ve lived peacefully,’ she said. ‘We don’t bother anyone, nobody bothers us. We want to live our lives. That’s all. But then you came here and everything changed.’

‘So this is my fault?’ he asked incredulously. ‘You’re saying that I have the blood on my hands of the people you killed?’

There were heavy steps coming from the kitchen. Luc turned quickly at the sound. Bonnet filled the doorway with his bulky frame. He hadn’t shaved in a while and his cheeks were white with stubble.

‘We have a right to protect ourselves!’ He was almost spitting. ‘We have a right to be free. We have a right to be left alone. I will not permit us to be studied and poked and prodded and treated like animals in a zoo. All that will happen if you continue with this goddamn cave.’

His son was behind him, the sleeves of his T-shirt stretched tight over his bulging biceps. Both men strode into the sitting room. Their boots were muddy.

Luc stood and faced them down. ‘Okay, I’ve listened to Odile. I have some understanding of who you are. Fine. Now let me see Sara and let me bring her home.’

‘We need to talk to you first,’ Bonnet insisted.

‘About what?’

‘About who else knows? Who else did you tell about us?’

If they were intending to intimidate him with their glowers and their body language, they succeeded. Luc was large but he wasn’t a fighter. These men were capable of extreme violence, that much was clear.

‘No one else knows, but if anything happens to me, everyone will know. I’ve left a letter to be opened if I die or disappear.’

‘Where’s this letter?’ Bonnet demanded.

‘I’ve got nothing more to say. Where’s Sara?’

Jacques was sneering now. ‘She’s not far. I’ve had my eye on her.’

That big oafish face oozing with sexual innuendo set Luc off. It didn’t matter that he was going to get the worst of it. It wasn’t a rational move, but he lunged forwards and caught Jacques firmly on the cheekbone with his clenched right fist.

It seemed to hurt his hand more than the man’s face because Jacques was able to shake it off and deliver a hard knee to Luc’s groin, dropping him on all fours and submerging him in a deep pool of pain and nausea.

‘Jacques, no!’ Odile screamed as her brother swung his leg back to kick him in the crotch again.

‘Not there!’ Bonnet ordered, and his son backed off. The mayor stood over Luc and smashed his fist down onto his neck with a hammer blow. ‘Here!’

Luc awoke with a dull throbbing in his head and a sharp pain in his neck. He squeezed the spot that hurt. It felt tender and bruised but his fingers and toes were moving so nothing was broken, he reasoned. He was on his side on an old musty camp bed facing a stone wall. Cold grey limestone, the backbone of the Périgord.

He rolled onto his back. Above him was a bare bulb hanging from its cord. He rolled again, this time onto his right side, and there was that face.

His skin was so white and pure it almost seemed ghostly. The young man was staring back at him every bit as steadily as the Mona Lisa stares down her admirers in the Louvre. It was the Raphael. The
Portrait of a Young Man
rested on a crate with German stencilling, propped against the damp stone wall as if it were a worthless canvas awaiting the dumpster or a yard sale.

He swung his legs and sat up. His head was pounding but he was able to stand. The room was about the size of Odile’s sitting room, cluttered with crates, rolled carpets and a hodge podge of bric-a-brac: candle sticks, vases, lamps, even a silver tea service. He picked up a candle stick and it was awfully heavy.

Christ, he thought, solid gold.

There was the clunk of a bolt unlocking and the door creaked open.

Bonnet and his son again.

They saw he had a candlestick in his hand. Bonnet pulled a small pistol from his pocket. ‘Put it down,’ he demanded.

Luc snorted at him and tossed it hard on the floor, denting it. ‘There goes half its value.’

‘Who has this letter you say you wrote?’ Bonnet asked again.

Luc thrust out his jaw. ‘I’m not saying anything else until I see Sara.’

‘You need to tell me,’ Bonnet said.

‘You need to screw yourself.’

Bonnet whispered into his son’s ear. Both men left and locked the door again. Luc had a better look around the room. The walls were stone, the floor concrete. The door was a solid-looking affair. The ceiling was plastered. Maybe there was an opportunity there. It wouldn’t be hard to climb up onto the crates and poke around. Then in the corner behind some cardboard boxes he noticed a jumble of hardware and cables. He swore out loud. His computers!

The door opened again.

This time Sara was there with Odile behind her. ‘Ten minutes, that’s all,’ Odile said, giving Sara a small shove. The door slammed again and they were alone.

She looked small and frail but at the same time she beamed at the sight of him. ‘Luc! My God, it’s you!’

‘You didn’t know I was coming?’

She shook her head and lowered it to hide her tears.

He moved forward and pulled her to his chest so she could cry against it. He felt her sobs with the palms of his hands pressed against her shuddering back. ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be okay. You’re not alone anymore. I’m here.’

She pulled away to dry her eyes and managed to smile again. ‘Are
you
okay?’ she asked. ‘Did they hurt you?’

‘No, I’m fine. Where are we?’

‘I’m not sure. I haven’t seen anything but the inside of a room like this one and a tiny loo. I think we’re underground.’

‘I’ve been sick with worry about you,’ Luc said. ‘You fell off the face of the earth. I had no idea what happened. I went to your flat. I called your boss. I tried to get the police to investigate.’

‘I never made it out of Cambridge,’ she replied weakly.

She’d stayed at Fred Prentice’s side in the bustling corridor of the Nuffield Hospital. Luc had told her there’d been an emergency back in France. Something bad, nothing more. He had to go, he was sorry. He’d call when he knew the facts, and then he was gone.

Fred saw she was shaken, and in his fractured state,
he
was the one consoling
her
.

‘I’m sure it’ll be all right,’ he said.

‘Fred, for God’s sake, don’t worry about me!’

‘You look upset. I wish you had a chair. Maybe they can bring one.’

‘I’m fine.’ She leaned over his railing and patted him on his only uninjured limb. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you found?’