The Collaborators (38 page)

Authors: Reginald Hill

Tags: #Fiction, #War & Military

BOOK: The Collaborators

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They brought Günter Mai out of the hospital as dawn was breaking. His head was still heavily bandaged and beneath his shirt his cracked ribs were swathed so tight that breathing was not so much painful as almost impossible. His legs too felt weak, but despite all this debility, the gendarmes still insisted on manacling his hands.

In the vestibule, two military policemen were waiting to escort him to a POW camp. There was a great deal of form-filling before he was satisfactorily transferred from civil to military custody. Then he was briefly in the open air before being helped into the back of a truck.

Just as it was about to start, one of the gendarmes came hurrying after them.

‘What’s up?’ asked the sergeant in charge of the escort.

‘The manacles,’ said the breathless gendarme. ‘I forgot.’

To the accompaniment of jeers from the soldiers, the man unlocked and removed the manacles, then hurried away.

‘Well, Fritz, you’re not going to try to escape, are you?’ said the sergeant.

‘Where to?’ asked Mai.

‘That’s sensible.’ He banged on the cab and the truck moved towards the gate.

‘Are we going far?’

‘Far enough. But it’ll be nice for you to be back with your mates, won’t it? Sort of a homecoming.’

He seemed to mean his comment to be friendly. Mai tried a smile, but he felt more depressed than at almost any time in the past year. What kind of homecoming was now possible for him when all he wanted, but could never have, lay in this city he was now leaving?

As the truck passed through the gates and swung across the road to turn left, the sergeant pulled open the canvas flap over the tailboard.

‘Some people were keen to see the back of you,’ he said enigmatically.

Mai glanced out of the truck. It was true. There was a small group of spectators on the pavement outside the gate. Four people, a man, a woman, two children. His mind fought against what it was sure was the madness of recognition. He blinked his eyes as though he had stared into the sun. They were still there, the delusion strong as ever.

He tried to speak but couldn’t. The truck was already beginning to move away. He let his gaze run swiftly over Claude Crozier’s amiable features, stern now in the dawn light; down to little Céci’s round face, her mouth open wide in a yawn; across to Pauli’s sallow oval, his eyes unblinking and wary; and finally up to Janine. Her face was thin, so very thin. Even the scarf bound tightly round her head couldn’t disguise the ravages of assault and imprisonment.

But there was life in her features now, life triumphing over the deathly despair he had seen in court. He recalled her running down the path in the Jardin des Plantes and turning to wave and smile like a young girl leaving her lover.

She smiled now and as the truck gathered speed, she raised her hand briefly from Pauli’s shoulder and waved.

He waved back. It didn’t feel like waving goodbye.

Now they were tiny anonymous figures in a long empty street. And now they were gone altogether. But still he peered out of the truck, like a tourist anxious not to miss any of the sights. It seemed their route took them across the city and at this hour it was easy to drive through its empty heart. They crossed the Seine, heavy and fast with the floods of spring. They passed beneath the gilded Victory on the Colonne du Palmier. They drove up the Rue de Rivoli, whose long arcade still bore the shell marks which turned it too into a monument to victory. They passed the Louvre where Christian Valois had made his first act of resistance. And then they drove past the Tuileries Garden where he, Günter Mai, had made his first declaration of love to Janine Simonian.

His eyes stopped seeing outwardly here. He hardly noticed as they climbed the Champs-Élysées, passing Le Colisée where he had sat and talked with Michel Boucher, till they reached the Arc de Triomphe and the Eternal Flame.

Here he took one last look out over the city. It was coming to life now after the long dark night. God knows what these Frenchmen would make of the future. He’d never been able to understand them. But this was nothing to the problems of understanding he feared his own countrymen might be setting the Allied Armies as they drove deeper into Germany’s dark heart.

He shuddered and let the flap drop as they descended to Porte Maillot.

‘Seen enough?’ said the sergeant.

‘For now,’ said Mai.

‘For
now?
You mean you’re planning to come back? I’ll say this for you Fritzes. You don’t know when you’re beaten!’

‘Oh yes, we do. It’s knowing when you’ve won that’s difficult,’ said Günter Mai.

By the same author

DALZIEL AND PASCOE NOVELS

A Clubbable Woman

An Advancement of Learning

Ruling Passion

An April Shroud

A Pinch of Snuff

A Killing Kindness

Deadheads

Exit Lines

Child’s Play

Underworld

Bones and Silence

One Small Step

Recalled to Life

Pictures of Perfection

Asking For the Moon

The Wood Beyond

On Beulah Height

Arms and the Women

Dialogues of the Dead

Death’s Jest-Book Good Morning, Midnight

JOE SIXSMITH NOVELS

Blood Sympathy

Born Guilty Killing the Lawyers Singing the Sadness

Fell of Dark

The Long Kill

Death of a Dormouse

Dream of Darkness

The Only Game The Stranger House

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or

localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollins 2005 1

Reginald Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ePub Edition 9780007290079

First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1987

Set in Sabon by Palimpsest Book Production Limited Polmont, Stirlingshire

Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.