Hitler's Girls (15 page)

He dared not tell this ignorant girl, bred on a diet of war films and twisted history, exactly what he meant. It was too soon.

“We need you, Mel.” He saw she was becoming drowsy and so he pressed his luck. “Mel—we should be together, you and I.”

He had courted the girl, he had fed her drugs, he had bought her what she wanted. He knew she had been excited by him, an older man, rich and attractive, but he had never done any more than kiss her, on the cheek, or on the brow. “Together, we can do great things, greater than you can possibly imagine.” But was this what she wanted to hear? “You are so pretty,” he said. Then the hand withdrew from his. He took it again. This time there was resistance. She did not know what she was doing. “So pretty, and so lovely. You cannot know how much I want you.”

Mel rolled to one side and put her hands over her ears. “Leave me alone.”

“How can I, when you mean so much to me?” He leaned over her now. “Mel—” he said urgently. “Mel—I have waited so long.”

“Please, please, please,” she begged. “Please go away.”

“Mel,” he urged.

“Please—please—leave me alone.”

He kissed her gently on the lips. She rolled further away from him and sat up, screaming, “Leave me alone! Leave me alone! I’m telling you—leave me alone! I want to go home. I want to see my Gran. I want Chris. I want to see Chris.” She collapsed, face down, sobbing, mumbling, “I want to see Chris.”

With effort, Muller controlled his rage. He said, “I’m sorry. I’ll send the maid to you.”

Whipping the door open, he found the maid too close to the door. He shook out two more pills. “She’s upset,” he said to her. “Give her this medicine immediately.”

At the top of the stairs he met Drago, who studied his expression. “If they’re not willing, a man has to make them do what he wants,” said Drago. “Otherwise he’s not a man at all.” Muller pushed past him and went downstairs.

“Forget about the girl,” Drago called after him. “The world’s full of girls. It’s the money we want.”

I am in a laundry basket, Mr. Peter Müller’s laundry basket, to be precise. It is the old-fashioned kind, I am grateful to report, made from willow, or sheep hurdles, as they are known in that part of the Borders where to “herd a hill hursel” means to bring in a flock from the Roxburghshire hills and to confine them in a pen of this same distinctly appealing plaited osier’s material.

It is not easy to obtain a basket such as this, in our brash new age. I am in the back of an old van and the slats enable me to breathe more easily

Of our destination I know nothing. I am still determined to rescue my goddaughter Mel.

I have to admit that it was the egregious Jim Graham who facilitated my escape from the auberge.

Jim was finally defeated by a mille-feuilles of flaky pastry stuffed with fresh cream and confit of strawberries and topped by
fromage frais
, with a drizzle of praline sauce, and overlaid by beetroot purée. He dropped off into an uneasy slumber.
I was far from sleep. Mel was in grave danger. She must either remain with Muller to be a figurehead for the vicious men and women who planned to rule over Europe, or die. If she did not comply, they would never let her go free. I owed it to my friend Monica to save her. And now I too was threatened by these monsters.

No sensible thoughts came to me. I was trapped in this malodorous room, reverberating with the sound of my unwanted companion’s snores, with no solution coming to me.

I experienced a despair which must have been akin to that of my ancestors when they suddenly realised they were predestined to eternal damnation. Suddenly, Jim stirred, flung out an arm, muttered a woman’s name, “Celia” or “Cynthia,” I believe, or possibly “Cynara,” then sat up abruptly and remarked: “Why so pensive, fair dame?”

I explained that with my goddaughter in the hands of the cream of international Nazi groups, I did not expect to be joyful, nor was it reasonable for anyone to expect me to be. Jim, obviously one of those men who require women to be lighthearted and smiling, regardless of circumstances, was unsympathetic.

“Not much to be done about it,” he declared. “The auberge is ringed with tattooed charmers you took for French workers, protecting their rights, but who are actually protecting the upper echelons of the group, like Hitler’s brownshirts. The
chateau where they are due to assemble is even more heavily guarded. Forgive me for pointing it out, Miss Hastie, but you are not Bruce Willis.”

“Brute strength can often be overcome by intelligence,” I said, although I must admit that at that moment, this was more a statement of faith than conviction.

Jim rose from the bed and began to pace, irritatingly. One of his short forays took him to the window. He stopped, peered down intently, and exclaimed: “Malek! I don’t believe it.”

He was out of the room in a flash. Meanwhile I went cautiously to the window and saw him approach a man in an open-necked shirt and jeans, who was loading baskets into the back of a battered white van. The two began to talk animatedly, then they exchanged embraces, and next, they went round the corner, away from the front of the building.

When Jim came upstairs again ten minutes later, he was smiling in a self-satisfied manner. “Thanks to the instincts of an old pressman, the way into the chateau is ours,” he declared.

Not ours, but mine. To cut a long story short, the laundry-man was the son of the Malek with whom Jim had shared several happy days and nights holed up in a cave during the late war of independence in Algeria.

“I was just a lad at the outset of my career,” he told me. “Learning the noble art of lying flat while the bullets fly around
you, while you, no doubt were hanging around the Deux Magots with the rest of the armchair soldiers.”

These flashes of perception from Jim, whose brain has otherwise been pickled by a combination of alcohol and libido, never cease to surprise. “While you were talking about being and essence or essence and being, old Malek and I were sitting on bare earth sharing our last drops of water, stuck between two armies.”

Jim’s new friend knocked on the door, slid inside, greeted me politely, and offered to drive us hidden inside his van to the chateau. Since he was the regular laundryman, he would be allowed inside without question. Truly a piece of good fortune at a very dark time. And the credit for it must go to Jim.

It seemed best to me that Jim should remain at the auberge while I went alone up to the chateau. I appealed to him to remain, saying that, if present, he would increase our chances of detection, while if he remained at the auberge he would be an invaluable conduit for information and contacts with the authorities. I was acutely aware that matters might go badly awry and that intervention by the local police, the British Embassy, or even, God forbid, the press, might be the only help.

“These people are very dangerous,” Jim warned.

“I am fully aware of that. They have killed my friend, they have killed an innocent young man, and they have abducted my goddaughter,” was my frigid response to this obvious statement.

My tweed suit was lying desolate on the bed and I was clad in a long patterned skirt and a patterned blouse. Malek’s wife tied on a headscarf which concealed my hair and brow. She secured it under my chin. I looked at myself doubtfully in the mirror. My face was too pale, my eyes too blue.

“It’s not very convincing,” I said.

Jim snorted. “They won’t look at you,” he said.

Malek’s wife was more polite: “They don’t look at the servants, especially us.”

“I could get used to it, though,” Jim offered, with what I can only describe as a leer, although this expression quickly left his face when he saw mine. “I mean, it’s more feminine, somehow,” he added weakly. I did not reply.

Inevitably, there was further argument about the plan. Jim did not want me to face the ordeal alone. I reiterated that his presence in the van would further endanger us and that he would be more useful at the auberge. I discovered that in times of crisis there is seldom time for lengthy debate: decisions must be made quickly, even if they later turn out to have been wrong. Malek and his wife descended the staircase with suitable bundles of linen and I followed, my head bent, carrying a pile of
pillows. As I left the room, I had time to say to Jim: “I am worried about Malek and Nassima.”

“They know what those people stand for,” he said. “What do you think will happen to them if Muller and his gang take over?”

Algerians in France are chiefly housed in what are known as the “banlieues,” which are not the leafy suburbs suggested by the word, but vast housing estates where the residents are easy to find and therefore easy to control, like the ghettoes where other European immigrants once lived.

A chilling thought to carry with me as I hurried after Malek and Nassima.

I walked down the corridor of the
Trois Frères
, turned down the staircase and walked, stooped, past the desk, past the assorted evil-doers sipping after-dinner coffee in salon and dining-room, swinging their Gucci-clad feet and planning their next attack, suitably attired in Versace and Givenchy.

Now, crouched in clothing belonging to Muller and his servants, I am reduced to the status of those very poor and unwanted the neo-Nazis wish to see eliminated from the face of the world.

For, not to put too fine a point on it, I was forced to accommodate myself in this basket.

I am alone, standing on the side of the hill.

The stars are bright, as bright as the pinpoints of light that entered my willow basket through the holes in the plaiting.

When the car stopped suddenly, there were footsteps, the back of the van was flung open and Malek’s voice was raised in protest: “There’s nothing in there but laundry.”

I could only conclude that this was a roadblock, an additional precaution due to the status of the expected guests and the importance of their deliberations. If I were found, I would be a dead woman, and if I refused to give Muller and his associates the numbers to the secret account, they would torture me until I did. Muller had been unable to find the numbers in Monica’s house, Muller would know by now that Mel had never been entrusted with them, and therefore the only person in the world who knew those numbers was I, Jean Hastie. This information I had not fully confided to Jim, anticipating that were I to tell him
he would immediately come up with some rash scheme which would make this already dreadful situation worse.

Meanwhile Malek had started an argument with someone, presumably one of the guards manning the roadblock, protesting that he had a pass to get into the chateau and had never been stopped before.

Then I heard retreating feet and a third voice. Malek had decoyed the searchers away from me to the front of the van. My safety, and his, depended on my leaving the vehicle speedily, and undetected.

I pushed up the lid of the hamper in which I lay and crawled out, while at the front of the van the dispute continued. On hands and knees, I crawled to the door, then I pushed myself out onto the road and fell down into the darkness and took one of the baskets with me to aid my disguise.

A fine situation, indeed, for a woman with excellent qualifications and a prominent member of the Board of the Scottish National Trust, lying bruised and scraped on a dark road in the French countryside, disguised in a long skirt and headscarf.

But much was at stake: Mel’s well-being, possibly her life, and the future of Hitler’s foul fortune and the foul uses to which it would be put if it fell into the wrong hands.

While Malek continued to argue, and the guards became more abusive to him, I got to my feet and ran uphill. Casting a
look backwards, I observed one of the guards. To him I was now a woman, in crumpled Arab dress, and I guessed that to the others I would seem very much the same, stained and fatigued after a long walk in the scrub. I had been a stowaway in a van—they would understand that.

Suddenly I found myself encircled by small, dirty, and irritating children, swarthy as young Heathcliff when he was picked up on the streets of Liverpool. I asked the brats where I could find a telephone. We stood a little way up a gentle incline, and it should have been satisfying to witness the neo-Nazis sweeping by, unaware that Jean Hastie, their arch enemy, watched them, ready to deprive them of the kingdom so closely within their reach.

There was no telephone. I made a signal suggestive of a mobile (I loathe them) but this was misinterpreted, and met with howls of laughter.

I trudged down the road in search of some sign of civilisation.

Finally, I came to a small village. Here was a bar, indeed: my spirits rose accordingly, and, without realising the sight I presented to the world, I went inside.

The astonishment and rage at my effrontery was violent; certainly I shall never forget my reception in the neat and pleasant little village not two kilometres from Gordes. In excellent French, I asked if I might use a telephone.

First, menacing laughter. Laughter so dangerous, so threatening, that I had no choice but to turn around, and, still lugging my basket, go trembling out into the night.

I knew what it was, on that terrible day, to be an immigrant in the brave new Europe.

I ran on. A half moon looks down uncertainly. The stars are still bright.

My legs found the track and followed it, always upwards. A dog barks. Then I hear an anthem—music—it takes me back to school, to the songs I was taught with Monica, to the map of Europe, most of it red and impenetrable, on the wall of the shabby little schoolhouse at Edleston.

Suddenly, a pair of gates rear up like heraldic beasts across the road—no longer a track, smartly tarmacked, wider, curving between watered lawns green in the spotlights.

A man sits by the gates. A security guard. He nods at me and waves me through.

I am the Arab servant woman—the hood of my robe is close round my head. I walk through, my eyes on the ground, every bone in my body as servile as I can make it.

I reach the bend in the road which leads to the front lawn. Between two large spotlights I see a dark patch of grass, like a blemish on a face. I run to it. I crouch. The French windows of the house are straight ahead of me. I look in.