Hunting Ground (31 page)

I had with me an overnight bag, which I’d been allowed to pack. A change of underwear, a nightgown, and toothbrush, my cosmetic case, a few other things, all quite civilized. Dupuis demanded that I hand it over before entering the office, and it was taken by an orderly in jackboots and the black uniform of the SS, but he was not armed, and I had to wonder if the guards had been hidden and if they wanted us all to make a run for it?

Yes, that was exactly what they’d done, for once again that corridor was like a cage of frightened mice. No one knew whether he or she would be the first to bolt, but several knew for sure they’d follow if given but half a chance.

Schiller was in uniform, smoking a cigarette, lost in thought, perhaps, and standing over by one of the windows down whose sides heavy blackout curtains hung. He was looking out at the street, was immaculate—tall, slender, well built, the flaxen hair catching the light.

There was a desk, big, wide, a hectare or two of misplaced Georgian antiquity. Miscellaneous chairs, a carpet, et cetera, because none of it really mattered except for this: the desk, his chair behind it, the one that was directly in front, and the one that was behind that one.

Dupuis cleared his throat and said something subservient but was embarrassed to let me see him like this.

‘Frau de St-Germain,’ said Schiller. ‘A seat.’

‘Which one?’

It was that shabby, collaborationist gumshoe’s turn now, and he said, ‘Madame, you’re in grave trouble. Behave accordingly.’

I sat where I was supposed to. Dupuis pulled off his coat and hat, and sat directly behind me while Schiller built church steeples with his fingers, and that duelling scar had a paleness that emphasized the narrowness of his face, the lips especially. ‘Katyana Lutoslawski,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you had better tell us about her.’

‘Me? Perhaps first, Lieutenant, you had better tell me who this person is.’

‘But surely you remember,’ said Dupuis. ‘How could you forget?’

The dinner table, the supposed white arsenic. ‘
Ah, mon Dieu,
Lieutenant, I honestly don’t know who you mean.’

‘The redhead,’ said Schiller, still with church-steeple fingers tapping themselves impatiently.

‘The one who called herself Giselle,’ said Dupuis, causing me to turn to look at him, something I should never have done, for the shriek that lifted from Schiller made me jump.

‘The wife of Alexis Nikolai Ivanovich Lutoslawski!’ he shouted, was suddenly red in the face and on his feet with a threatening fist, and I knew for sure for me it had begun. The tiara and all that ancient history was soon pouring from him, everything the Action française thugs pried out of me in the forest. ‘Thomas Carrington, your lover!’ he shrieked.

‘My ex-lover. That business was over before it began, and if you can prove otherwise, Lieutenant, then you will only prove yourself wrong. And as for this … this woman, I never met her.’

‘And Lutoslawski?’

‘The robberies are linked to him, to objects he once possessed,’ said Dupuis.

‘Stolen from the Russians, our ally,’ said Schiller. ‘They want them back.’

‘You two are crazy. I’ve nothing to do with this. Why not ask my husband? Ask the Vuittons, eh? They’ll tell you all you need to know, and as for Russia being an ally, if you Germans keep saying the things you do, I think you can forget it soon.’

‘You were seen talking to that woman,’ said Schiller.

‘By your sister,’ added Dupuis.

‘Why not? I was the hostess, wasn’t I? Should I have ignored her?’

‘When did you notice she had left the party?’

‘I didn’t. I was in the library with everyone else, but personally, after what happened to her, I’d have left a lot sooner.’

‘The loot, madame. Where did you people hide it?’ asked Dupuis.

‘You’d better tell us,’ said Schiller. ‘It’ll go a lot easier on you.’

‘Listen, you two, I know nothing of this.’

‘Your papers … papers,’ snapped the lieutenant. ‘You’re English.’

I handed them over, but he knew all about them. ‘I have a cancer,’ I told him of the letter he was opening.

‘De Verville … yes, yes, I can see that he’s signed it. A German specialist will have to be consulted. I’ll see that we find one to examine you.’

Me, I was done for—finished—and I knew it, but realized then that he’d led me to this little point, the cancer of my womb. ‘Your sister, Frau de St-Germain, why is it that she has French citizenship and you don’t?’

My shrug was automatic, and I don’t think I could have stopped it had I wanted to. ‘Janine has always considered herself to be one hundred percent French. For myself, I’m fifty- fifty.’

‘A lover of the British. We can prove that Janine Marteau was involved in the robberies,’ said Schiller, still caressing my papers.

He let me think about it, then said, ‘Marteau is the last name of a former lover of that mother of yours. He’s the father of that illegitimate bastard you call a sister.’

There had been one slip-up, Nini the result, but our father had never held it against
maman
. Janine he loved as if his own, as did
maman.

‘The paintings,’ said Schiller, ‘and the other things that were stolen. Where are they?’

He’d a short, black leather strap folded over once, its two ends clutched in the right hand. Maybe it was five centimetres wide, maybe six, but it was thick enough to do lots of damage, and I had to wonder if Dupuis was the one who would have to hold me.

But there was a knock at the door. It was the orderly who took my suitcase. He crossed the room to confide something to Schiller who looked at me and smiled. ‘Your children, Frau de St-Germain. Apparently, they have more to say about this than yourself.’

‘A coffee, please, and some soup—thin soup, you understand. Put lots of water in it. And … and I’d like some bread. White, if you have it. Not black.’

The little restaurant is on a side street in Fontainebleau. If you want the truth, the thought of Schiller being with Dupuis and the others has really unsettled me. I also couldn’t take the cold and the loneliness after what happened with André. I had to come in for a while.

‘Madame, is it really you?’

Matthieu Fayelle is just the same, complete with thumbprints on his apron, the stomach of his wife’s good cooking, the moustache, and thick brown hair that’s still a little too long.

‘It’s me. I have to get warm. I need a bit of rest.’

‘Are you on the way out to the house? Madame, there’s nothing left. The Germans …’

‘Have taken everything. Yes … yes, I’m on my way for a last little visit. Matthieu, I need to be quiet. Look, Tommy was your friend, isn’t that right? He helped you, so now you must help me.’

‘A table in the sun. I’ll make sure no one sits nearby, but the soup, madame? Surely …’

‘Just the thin soup and a half-and-half coffee and water, no milk, no sugar. I’m still not used to things.’

He wipes his eyes, this great big guy who once drove a
gazogène
lorry for us. ‘We thought you dead,’ he says. ‘
Finie!’

‘And me, I thought you also,’ I say, looking up at him in warning.

He ducks his moist brown eyes and mutters, ‘It’s over, madame. They’ve all gone. We can begin to live again, eh? A little place … If you need a bed, a room, you have only to ask.’

‘I may need help. Please don’t forget this.’

‘For me, for us that are left, you have only to ask.’

‘Good.’

I sit in the sun and warm myself. Just a corner of the town hall can be seen, the
hôtel de ville et Feldkommandantur,
and I remember Matthieu and the others, but they came later. First there were the two robberies, then the interrogations, then my children and what they had inadvertently revealed to Georges and Tante Marie.

The soup is thin, as I’ve requested. Just a few slivers of onion, a little grated pepper, cheese baked on top, with butter, real butter. This I can’t believe. It hurts to look at it, to smell the aroma. Such simple things we all took for granted.

The bread is crusty. When broken, it soaks up the soup. The coffee is real. Matthieu flutters around. His wife has come out of the kitchen but is afraid to approach.

I tell him the soup is excellent, exactly what I need.

‘Was it hard for you?’ he asks. He’s all upset and twisting his hands in that apron of his.

‘It doesn’t matter. Look, I need some quiet, eh? I must think things through. I have a job to do and must be careful.’

He nods.
Ah!
he understands and says, ‘I’ve heard that Monsieur Jules and his friends are back.’

‘Then you know it will be wise for you and your wife to say nothing of me. Not until I make contact with you again. Hey, listen, my friend, can you get me some nine millimetres?’

He understands and leaves the restaurant. I finish the soup by running the bread slowly around the plate so as to catch the last droplets. Memory comes.

I drain the coffee cup.

Dupuis waited. He was very grave. He knew and I knew that somehow my children had betrayed me and that Georges and Tante Marie had much to say.

I’m right back there: 3 June 1941. In a gesture of sympathy or whatever—me, I don’t know—Dupuis had taken this opportunity to show a little compassion.

Before witnesses, of course, he fed me a bowl of soup and a coffee. A last supper.

‘Madame, please, it’s time to go.’

I got up and walked out to his car and we drove to the house. Marie … I remember that she was wearing her pink dress, with the white socks and glossy black saddle shoes. She was getting tall—growing like a weed. Her hair had been severely brushed, and it glistened as it fell below her shoulders.

She was so pale and frightened she didn’t say a thing. Jean-Guy eyed me suspiciously. No doubt Georges had been filling him full of things—adultery, the de St-Germain name, et cetera.

‘Monsieur Tommy,’ said Tante Marie. That old hen was bristling by the stove, just waiting to spill it all.

‘What about him?’ I asked.

‘He was here,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that correct, my husband?’

Georges nodded. ‘The boy has told us, madame.’

‘Of course, Monsieur Carrington was here, but that was ages ago, and the inspector remembers this.’

It was a gamble, but it worked. Luck was with me again. Jean-Guy had told them of Tommy’s earlier visit, when Dupuis had first come here looking for him on a charge of murder, February 1940.

‘But he’s been back since?’ hazarded Dupuis.

Both of my children shook their heads. ‘Ah, no, monsieur, he couldn’t have. He would’ve gone to prison,
n’est-ce pas
?’ said my daughter, widening her lovely eyes.

‘Prison,’ said my son. ‘He’s a bad one, Inspector. A number. I hope you catch him.’

Dupuis was exasperated with that old couple and gave them the blazes for being so stupid, but at the door he said, ‘We both know it won’t be so easy the next time.’

Matthieu Fayelle returns to take the dishes away. As he reaches for the soup plate, a spill of cartridges leaves his hand. ‘There are more if you should need them.’

As my hand closes about them, I say, ‘Get me a Schmeisser, two fully loaded magazines, and a grenade. Have them ready for me.’

‘But surely the police …’

‘You leave the
flics
out of this! Dupuis is with them at the house. It’s a private matter, Matthieu. I want no interference.’

Down through the beeches, I can see the millpond before the small, quaint farmhouse of the Poulins, whose white stucco and green shutters form a tidy place where geese are force-fed while the husband basks in the sun. It’s a scene out of Sisley. Good people, those two. Before the war, I used to bring the children here in my little car to buy eggs and goose livers. While they were with Madame Poulin, I would bathe at the far end of the pond behind a screen of reeds. Henri Poulin would stand in his flat-bottomed punt, pretending to fish, and I didn’t mind if he saw me. I rather liked the idea. It was, in a way, a chance for me to repay him.

Janine and Michèle came for a visit early in July of that summer of 1941, and the three of us rode out here on our bicycles. The pond is southwest of Fontainebleau, on the road to the village of Ury, so you pass through the forest and, for us, it was to be a little holiday.

They had both obtained an
Ausweis
for the weekend. Michèle had asked the general who was interested in her to help, so we had two days and the weather was perfect. Marcel was at the house and when that Saturday’s school was out, the children would be with him.

It was a chance to talk. Our bicycles lay in the grass behind us, we on the blanket Janine had brought. A wicker picnic basket provided everything, along with two bottles of Château Latour-Blanche, the 1927, my having plundered my husband’s cellar. Bees hummed among the daisies, buttercups, and sky-blue chicory. Nini lay on her back, Michèle on her tummy. Me, I sat right where I’m sitting now. ‘We have to leave it for a while,’ I told them. ‘Lie low. Let Schiller and Dupuis plug away, but don’t do anything to stir things.’

It’s Michèle who said, ‘Henri-Philppe told me there’s to be a big auction this autumn, that it looks like Göring’s Luftwaffe will finish off the Russians and the Wehrmacht will be in Moscow by then.’ The Germans had invaded Russia on 22 June.

‘And you … what do you think about it?’ Janine asked her.

‘Me, I don’t even want to talk about it!’

‘
Idiote!’
said my sister. ‘The
Boche
are going to lose.’

‘But Göring will still be there for the auction. Henri-Philippe’s certain a notice has been sent to Hofer. They always send notices to him when something’s coming up. Jules is in on it, too. He and the Vuittons have been over the lists of works that are to be sold. Now leave me be!’

She was so near to tears, we let her rest. I even lowered my voice. ‘Nini, I meant what I said. That trip to Paris with Dupuis finished me. I’ve the children to think of.’

‘And Tommy?’ she asked.

‘I’m going to ask him to take the children and me to Switzerland or out through Spain. It’s worth the risk. I can’t stay here.’

She flung her straw away. ‘Neither are possible! If they were, Tommy would have done it. Besides, we have to move people. Those places are reserved for them.’