Citadel (81 page)
In the end, she couldn’t think of anything other than to go home. Her feet seemed to be taking her there of their own volition. It was stupid, so she reasoned the Gestapo, or Milice – whoever Authié was working for – would never think she’d go back to the rue du Palais. Sandrine felt incapable of coming up with an alternative plan. She felt dizzy with exhaustion, defeated by the long days and nights that had led up to this moment. And she was so close now. She could go there, fetch fresh clothes, then be gone before it got light. She wouldn’t be putting anyone else in danger. After that, all she had to do was work out how to get safely to Coustaussa to join the others.
Ten minutes later, she was walking quickly up the rue de Strasbourg and through the gate into their back garden. The house was dark, she could see nothing unusual, no signs that anyone had been there. She rested her hand for an instant against the trunk of the fig tree as if, by touching something solid, she would anchor herself. But she felt only sadness at the loss of her old life. The ground was sticky with windfalls. Sandrine was pleased Marieta couldn’t see how she and Marianne had let the garden run wild.
For a moment, she pictured herself sitting peacefully on the old white wrought-iron furniture. Reading a book or sipping a glass of Marieta’s home-made lemonade. She shook her head. Such nostalgic thoughts were no use to her now.
Keeping close to the periphery of the courtyard, Sandrine made her way to the stone steps. Taking the key from beneath the glass jar on the window ledge, she opened the back door and slowly walked in, locking it again after her. She held her breath, listening to the silence, trying to distinguish sounds of other people in the house. Intruders.
She let out a long sigh. The house was empty, she could feel it. Just her and friendly ghosts, the memories of all of them held in the waiting air. In the gloomy kitchen, she could see nothing had been touched since she and Lucie had left. Their crockery washed and draining by the sink. The remains of a loaf on the wooden board beneath the cloth.
Using her hands to guide herself in the dark house, Sandrine walked into the corridor, remembering all the people who had passed through in the early years of the war. The Dutch
résistants
and German anti-fascists.
On she went through the silent house. Her father’s study, where the four Belgian soldiers, fighting with the Secret Army, had camped out for a week, waiting to be taken to the house of Abbé Gau prior to the long journey south and out of France, via the Roc Blanc escape route. Then Belcaire or Rouze – or Ax-les-Thermes, where Monsieur Baillard had last been seen – over the Pyrenees to Andorra and Spain.
Her fingers found a box of John Bull safety matches on the desk, left behind, she presumed, by the one British airman who had found his way to the rue du Palais. They regularly cleared the house of any potentially incriminating objects and she was amazed it had survived for so long. She picked it up and slipped it into her pocket, recalling the Englishman’s open expression and his inability to speak even the most basic French. They had communicated in sign language, but his gratitude for the risks they were taking on his behalf, he had taken great pains to make clear. When he’d left, he had kissed her hand and put his own to his chest. Sandrine had never forgotten it. She hoped the courteous young man had survived.
At the foot of the stairs, she stopped. The moon was shining through the window, illuminating the photographs on the wall. Sandrine now realised what had been niggling in her mind. Lucie had helped her destroy the few things that could give a clue as to where they’d gone. All the official documents had been taken to safety a long time ago – deeds and bills of sale – but there were a handful of letters with the Coustaussa address on them. They’d got rid of everything except the pictures of the
capitelles
and the ruined castle. It would take no time at all to identify the village.
Sandrine hesitated. The photos were precious. Her mother had taken them and she didn’t want to destroy them. It felt as if she was doing Authié’s work for him. She hesitated a moment more, then, with quick, sad fingers, she took them down from the wall and carried them to the sink in the kitchen. She eased each black and white photograph out and, with a silent apology to her mother, put the match to them.
She watched the paper curl and scorch, then flare and burn black, the orange glow too bright in the dark kitchen. The pipes thumped as she turned on the taps to damp the heat. Then she wrapped the soggy ash in a tea towel and carried it down to the cellar for the mice to find. The frames she hid behind the empty wine racks.
Aware of the time passing, Sandrine went upstairs again. Passed the empty spaces on the wall, dust marking their silhouette, telling herself she should hurry. She ran her hand over the warm wood of the un-polished banister, remembering the girl she had been. An innocent time, better times.
She glanced up at the window on the landing. The silver rays of the moon sent the diamonds of coloured light sparkling on to the stairs. She was taking too long, she was too slow, she knew it, but the nostalgia for her lost life was too strong to resist.
She went past Marianne’s room, past her father’s room – where first Liesl, then Suzanne had slept – and pushed open her own bedroom door. She ran her hand along the high back of the Chinese chaise, remembering all the times Marianne had sat herself down there to dispense advice, twilight tête-à-têtes and midnight confidences. Her sheets still rumpled from where she and Raoul had lain side by side.
Sandrine took a plain skirt from the wardrobe and an unremarkable shirt, nothing too fancy. She hesitated, then pulled on her old tartan woollen socks to cover the red bites and nettle stings on her legs. She sat down on the bed to put on her shoes, a pair of Marianne’s old teaching shoes. The soles were worn through and she had lined them with cardboard. They’d do all right for now.
She realised that her mood was in part because of the lack of sleep, the endless disabling isolation of fear. But also because it was finally hitting her that this really was the last time she would be in the house, perhaps ever. She and Marianne had said as much, but she hadn’t really taken it in. And when Raoul was here, then she and Lucie were rushing to clear everything, activity had stopped her from thinking.
Now, in this silent and private moment, she felt overwhelmed with grief. She looked up at the familiar damp patch on the ceiling above her bed, a legacy of that bitter winter of 1942, when the pipes all froze and the guttering cracked. Then, with the thaw in the spring, the rain had come dripping through.
She smiled ruefully. Suzanne had promised to fix it. Raoul had offered to fix it, but no one had. Sandrine felt so utterly exhausted. She knew it was a mistake to sit down at all, but she couldn’t drag her eyes away from the tear-shaped stain. She smiled. Likely as not, the patch would still need fixing by the time Jean-Jacques was grown up and old enough to do it. Or even a child of her own. She put her hand on her stomach, thinking of how they had made love when Raoul arrived on Sunday night, how it had felt different. She didn’t feel anything had changed, but all the same, she couldn’t help herself wondering.
The words of the lullaby came back to her. A mother singing to her baby?
Bona nuèit, bona nuèit
. A child of their own, a son or a daughter, Sandrine realised she didn’t care. Would Raoul prefer a son first? She didn’t think so.
For a few stolen moments more, she sat quietly in her childhood room. Forgetting who she was, what she was supposed to be doing, dreaming in the darkness instead of what might have been.
Then, abrupt and violent, the sound she’d imagined so many times. The hammering on the door, the rough voices, the shouting.
‘Police.
Polizei!
’
Sandrine jolted awake. Bolt upright, her eyes wide open, her right hand stretched out as if she was trying to grasp something. For a moment she was neither asleep nor awake, as if some part of her had been left behind in the dream.
The noise she’d expected every waking minute of every day, every night, for the past two years. She was amazed at how calm she felt, how she seemed to go into action without thinking about it. Muscle memory, anticipation, her arms and limbs moving seemingly independent of her.
In the hall below, now, the sound of wood splintering as jackboots kicked in the front door. An idiot to have let herself drift to sleep, an idiot to have come here at all. Men’s voices in the hall, French and German. The remembered familiar voice of Laval, heard only in snatches, but embedded in her memory like a splinter of glass.
Instinct kicked in. No reason why Raoul would come looking for her here, why anyone would come. She had promised not to come back to the house, why would he disbelieve her? But even so, she quickly scribbled a note, stuffed it into the matchbox and dropped it from the window of the
salle de bains
, praying the soldiers would not search the garden properly and it might lie undiscovered.
Then she headed upstairs for the attic, hoping she could hide herself. That they might pass by. But a flash of grey, of green. Now the
vert-de-gris
were storming up the stairs, the blue berets of the Milice trailing behind. Glass smashing, drawers, the tearing of fabric as the search began.
Then, a Gestapo agent grabbing her by the hair, feeling the skin tear on her scalp, being pulled down from the ladder, a second pair of hands around her waist, holding her legs, dragging her to the ground.
Laval’s voice in her ear. ‘
C’est fini, maintenant
.’
Sandrine felt her arms being dragged up behind her back, handcuffs pinching the skin around her wrists, and she was half carried, half pushed down the stairs to where the car was waiting in the street.
Laval threw her into the back.
‘Where are you taking me?’ she managed to say, struggling to sit upright.
He struck her hard on the side of her head. Stunned, Sandrine fell sideways on the seat, then struggled to right herself.
‘You’ve caused a lot of trouble,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Don’t make it worse for yourself.’
R
aoul knew it was a risk, but it was the only place left to go. Bonnet had told him to stay away – and he and Sandrine had agreed they wouldn’t return to the house – but he didn’t know where else to try.
Sandrine had to be here. Because if she wasn’t, then it meant . . . Raoul couldn’t let himself think about the alternative. By five thirty, he was standing at the corner of the rue de Strasbourg and the rue de Lorraine, trying to see if he could get into the garden without being spotted. Madame Fournier wouldn’t be up this early, but he couldn’t see any sign of Milice or Gestapo watching the house either.
He looked out of place in this quartier. Because of the Feldgendarmerie and the Deuxième Bureau offices in rue Mazagran, many senior Gestapo and Wehrmacht officers had lodgings in these elegant nineteenth-century streets near the Palais de Justice. Sandrine had always felt it kept them secure. This wasn’t the sort of area where safe houses were usually to be found. The Gestapo raids happened in the poorer quarters.
Raoul walked quickly and slipped in through the garden gate, surprised to find it unlocked. The ground beneath his feet was sticky with rotten figs and there were weeds everywhere. He crept up the stone steps and, cupping his hands, peered in through the glass. It was dark inside and he couldn’t see anything at all, though he detected a slight smell of burning. He tried the handle, but the door was locked. He looked for the key under the usual glass jar, but it wasn’t there. He frowned. Then he noticed that the bathroom window on the first floor was open. Not just open, but wide open.
Glancing at Madame Fournier’s windows, and seeing no movement, Raoul scaled the railings and stepped across on to the wide window ledge on the ground floor. He still couldn’t see in. He jumped back down, landing in a pile of twigs and dried leaves, blown into the corner of the courtyard last autumn and never swept up. He bent down. In amongst the browns and greens was a red and black matchbox. English brand. It was clean and dry. It certainly hadn’t been there all winter.
His heart beating fast, Raoul slid open the box. Inside, three unspent matches and a small piece of paper. He unfolded the paper and recognised Sandrine’s handwriting:
SD
– 5
A.M
.
‘No, no, no, no.’
Raoul felt as if he’d been punched in the chest. His heart hammered against his ribs, his breath caught in his throat. SD stood for Sicherheitdienst, the Gestapo. The note told him they’d come for her at five o’clock.
He wanted to scream, to rip the sky in two or tear down the house with his bare hands. He screwed the paper in his fist, tighter, forcing all the fury, the terror out through his fingers, into his nails, into the palm of his hand until he drew blood.
Little by little, he controlled the rage thundering through his brain. He looked at his watch. Nearly six. Sandrine was writing a note for him an hour ago. She was alive an hour ago.
Raoul shook his head, he couldn’t think like that. Of course she was alive. He took a match from the box and burned the note. He had to think. Concentrate. The Gestapo would have taken her either to the villa on the route de Toulouse or to the Caserne Laperrine.
One hour ago. If he’d come earlier, he could have stopped them.
Raoul forced himself not to think about what might be happening. Many partisans had been detained in the route de Toulouse and had suffered at the hands of the Gestapo interrogators. It was impossible to get in, impossible to get anyone out. There had been attempts in the past, none successful.
It didn’t matter. It was Sandrine. Wherever she was, he would find her and get her out. Or die trying, a voice in his head whispered.
Raoul ignored it. He ran back through the courtyard and into the street, heading once again for the Quai Riquet.
‘
W
here is it?’ Laval said again.
