The Young Lions (73 page)

She stopped speaking, her opium-like voice dying among the shadows of the cushioned couch.

Christian stood up. He went over and stared at her for a moment. She looked up at him, her eyes wide, smiling with candour.

He knelt swiftly and kissed her.

He lay beside her in the dark bed. The window-curtains were blowing gently in the summer night wind. A pale silvery wash of moonlight draped and made soft the outlines of the dressingtable, the chairs with his clothes thrown over them.

The German-hater… He smiled and turned his head. Her hair tumbled in a dark, fragrant mass on the pillow, Francoise was lying beside him, touching his skin lightly with the tips of her fingers, her eyes once more mysterious in the wavering pale light.

She smiled slowly. "See," she said, "you weren't so terribly tired, after all, were you?"

They laughed together. He moved his head and kissed the smooth, silvery skin where her throat joined her shoulder, drowsily submerged in the mingled textures of skin and hair, swimming hazily in the living double fragrance of hair and skin.

"There is something to be said," Francoise whispered, "for all retreats."

Through the open window came the sound of soldiers marching, hobnails making a remote military rhythmic clatter, pleasant and meaningless heard in this way in a hidden room through the tangled perfumed strands of his mistress's hair.

"I knew it, as soon as I saw you," Francoise said. "The first time, long ago, that it could be like this. Formidable. I could tell."

"Why did you wait so long?" Christian pulled back gently, turning, looking up at the pattern the moonlight, reflected from a mirror, made on the ceiling. "God, the time we've wasted. Why didn't you do this then?"

"I was not making love to Germans, then," Francoise said coolly. "I did not think it was admirable to surrender everything in the country to the conqueror. You may not believe this, and I don't care whether you do or not, but you are the first German I have let touch me."

"I believe you," Christian said. And he did, because whatever else her faults might be, dishonesty was certainly not one of them.

"Don't think it was easy," Francoise said. "I am not a nun."

"Oh, no," said Christian gravely. "I will swear to that."

Francoise did not laugh. "You were not the only one," she said. "So many magnificent young men, such a pleasant variety of young men… But, not one of them, not one… The conquerors did not get anything… Not until tonight…"

Christian hesitated, vaguely troubled. "Why," he asked, "why have you changed now?"

"Oh, it's all right now." Francoise laughed, a sly, sleepy, satisfied, womanly laugh. "It's perfectly all right now. You're not a conqueror any more, darling, you're a refugee…" She twisted over to him and kissed him. "Now," she said, "it is time to sleep…"

She moved over to her side of the bed. Lying flat on her back, with her arms chastely at her side, her long body sweepingly outlined under the white blur of the sheet, she soon dropped off to sleep. Her breath came in an even, healthy rhythm in the quiet room.

Christian did not sleep. He lay uncomfortably, with growing rigidity, listening to the breathing of the woman beside him, staring at the moon and mirror-flecked ceiling. Outside, there was the noise of the hobnailed patrol again, increasing and receding on the silent pavement. It did not sound remote any more, or pleasant, or meaningless.

Refugee, Christian remembered, and remembered the low, mocking laugh that accompanied it. He turned his head a little and looked at Francoise. Even as she slept, he imagined seeing a superior, victorious smile at the corner of the long, passionate mouth. Christian Diestl, the non-conquering refugee, finally given admission to the Parisienne's bed. The French, he remembered, they will beat us all yet. And, what's worse, they know it.

Suddenly it was intolerable to think of Brandt snoring softly in the next room, intolerable for himself to remain in bed next to the handsome woman who had used him so comfortably and mercilessly. He slid noiselessly on to the floor and walked barefooted and naked over to the window. He stared out over the roofs of the sleeping city, the chimneys shining under the moon, the pale streets winding away narrowly with their memories of other centuries, the river shining under its bridges in the distance. He could hear the patrol from the window, faint and brave across the still dark air, and he got a glimpse of it as it crossed an intersection. Five men walking deliberately and cautiously down the night-time streets of the enemy, vulnerable, stolid, pathetic, friends…

Swiftly and soundlessly, Christian dressed himself. Francoise stirred once, threw her arm out languidly towards the other side of the bed, but she did not awake. Her arm looked white and snake-like stretched into the warm emptiness beside her.

Christian stole through the door and closed it softly behind him.

Fifteen minutes later he was standing before the desk of a Colonel in the SS. In the sleeping city, the SS officers did not sleep. The rooms were brilliantly lighted, men came and went in an endless bustle, there was the clatter of typewriters and teletype machines, and it had the unreal, hectic air of a factory going full blast during an overtime night-shift.

The Colonel behind the desk was wide awake. He was short and he wore heavy horn-rimmed glasses, but there was no air of the clerk about him. He had a thin gash for a mouth, and his magnified pale eyes were coldly probing behind their glasses. He held himself like a weapon always in readiness to strike.

"Very good, Sergeant," the Colonel was saying. "You will go with Lieutenant von Schlain and point out the house and identify the deserter and the women who are hiding him."

"Yes, Sir," said Christian.

"You are right in supposing that your organization no longer exists as a military unit," the Colonel said dispassionately. "It was overrun and destroyed five days ago. You have displayed considerable courage and ingenuity in saving yourself…" Christian could not tell whether the Colonel was being ironic or not, and he felt a twinge of uneasiness. The Colonel, he realized, made a technique out of making other people uneasy, but there was always the chance this was something special. "I shall have orders made out for you," the Colonel went on, his eyes glinting behind the thick lenses, "to be returned to Germany for a short leave, and assigned to a new unit there. In a very short time, Sergeant," the Colonel said, without expression in his voice, "we will need men like you on the soil of the Fatherland. That is all. Heil Hitler."

Christian saluted and went out of the room with Lieutenant von Schlain, who also wore glasses.

In the small car with Lieutenant von Schlain, which preceded the open truck with the soldiers, Christian asked, "What will happen to him?"

"Oh," said von Schlain, yawning, taking off his glasses, "we'll shoot him tomorrow. We shoot a dozen deserters a day, and now, with the retreat, business will be better than ever." He put his glasses back and peered out. "Is this the street?"

"This is the street," Christian said. "Stop here."

The small car stopped in front of the well-remembered door. The truck clanged to a halt behind it and the soldiers jumped out.

"No need for you to go up with us," von Schlain said. "Might make it unpleasant. Just tell me which floor and which door and I'll handle it in no time."

"Top floor," said Christian, "the first door to the right of the stairway."

"Good," said von Schlain. He had a lordly, disdainful way of speaking, as though he felt that the Army was making poor use of his great talents, and he wished the world to understand that immediately. He gestured languidly to the four soldiers who had come in the truck, and went up the steps and rang the bell, very loudly.

Standing on the kerb, leaning against the car in which he had come from SS Headquarters, Christian could hear the bell wailing mournfully away in the concierge's quarters deep in the sleeping fastnesses of the house. Von Schlain never took his finger off the bell, and the ringing persisted in a hollow, nervous crescendo. Christian fit a cigarette and pulled at it hard. They'll hear it upstairs, he thought. That von Schlain is an idiot.

Finally there was a clanking at the door and Christian heard the irritable, sleepy voice of the concierge. Von Schlain barked at her in rapid French and the door swung open. Von Schlain and the four soldiers went in and the door closed behind them.

Christian paced slowly up and down alongside the car, puffing on the cigarette. Dawn was beginning to break and a pearly light, mingled with secret blues and silvery lavenders, was drifting across the streets and buildings of Paris. It was very beautiful and Christian hated it. Soon, that day perhaps, he would leave Paris, and probably never see it again in his whole life, and he was glad. Leave it to the French, to the supple, cheatingly, everlastingly victorious French… He was well rid of it. It looked like a fair meadow and it turned out to be slippery swamp-land. It seemed full of beauty and promise and it turned out to be a sordid trap, well-baited and fatal to a man's dignity and honour. Deceptively soft, it blunted all weapons that attacked it. Deceptively gay, it lured its conquerors into a bottomless melancholy.' Long ago, the Medical Corps had been right. The cynical men of science had supplied the Army with the only proper equipment for the conquest of Paris… three tubes of Salvarsan…

The door was flung open and Brandt, with a civilian coat thrown over pyjamas, came out between two soldiers. Just behind him came Francoise and Simone, in robes and slippers. Simone was sobbing, in a childish, strangled, tearing convulsion, but Francoise looked out at the soldiers with calm derision.

Christian stared at Brandt, who looked painfully back at him in the half-light. There was no expression on Brandt's face, snatched out of its deep, secure sleep, only dull exhaustion. Christian hated the lined, over-delicate, compromising, losing face. Why, he thought with surprise, he doesn't even look like a German!

"That's the man," Christian said to von Schlain, "and those're the two women."

The soldiers pushed Brandt up into the truck, and rather gently lifted Simone, now lost in a tangled wet marsh of tears. Helplessly, Simone, once she was in the truck, stretched out her hand towards Brandt. Christian despised Brandt for the soft, tragic way in which without shame, in front of the comrades he would have deserted, he put out his hand to take Simone's and carry it up to his cheek.

Francoise refused to allow the soldiers to help her climb into the truck. She stared for a moment with harsh intensity at Christian, then shook her head gently in a gesture of numb bewilderment, and climbed heavily up by herself.

There, Christian thought, watching her, there, you see, it is not all over yet. Even now, there are still some victories to be won…

The truck started down the street. Christian got into the small car with Lieutenant von Schlain and followed it through the streets of dawning Paris towards SS Headquarters.

THERE was something wrong about the town. There were no flags hanging out of the windows, as there had been in all the towns along the way from Coutances. There were no improvised signs welcoming the deliverers, and two Frenchmen who saw the jeep ducked into houses when Michael called to them.

"Stop the jeep," Michael said to Stellevato. "There's something fishy here."

They were on the outskirts of the town, at a wide intersection of roads. The roads, stretching bleakly away in the grey morning, were cold and empty. There was no movement to be seen anywhere, only the shuttered windows of the stone houses, and the vacant roads with nothing stirring on them. After the crowded month, in which almost every road in France had seemed to be jammed with tanks and half-tracks and petrol lorries and artillery pieces and marching men, in which every town had been crowded with cheering Frenchmen and women in their brightest clothes, waving flags hidden through all the years of the Occupation, and singing the Marseillaise, there was something threatening and baleful about the dead silence around them.

"What's the matter, Bo?" Keane said from the back seat.

"Did we get on the wrong train?"

"I don't know," Michael said, annoyed at Keane. Pavone had told him to pick up Keane three days ago, and Keane had spent the three days in mournful chatter about how timidly the war was being run, and how his wife kept writing to him that the money she was getting was not enough to keep a family alive with prices going up the way they were. By now, the prices of chopped meat, butter, bread and children's shoes were indelibly engraved in Michael's brain, thanks to Keane. In 1970, if somebody asks me how much hamburger cost in the summer of 1944, Michael thought irritably, I'll answer, sixty-five cents a pound, without thinking for a second.

He got out the map and opened it on his knees. Behind him he heard Keane snapping the safety-catch off his carbine. A cowboy, Michael thought, staring at the map, a brainless, bloodthirsty cowboy…

Stellevato, slouched in the front seat beside him, smoking a cigarette, his helmet tipped far back on his head, said, "Do you know what I could use now? One bottle of wine and one French dame." Stellevato was either too young, too brave, or too stupid to be affected by the autumnal, dangerous morning, and by the unusual, unliberated aspect of the buildings in front of them.

"This is the place, all right," Michael said, "but it certainly doesn't look good to me." Four days before, Pavone had sent him back to Twelfth Army Group with a bagful of reports on a dozen towns they had inspected, reports on the public-utility situations, the food reserves, the number of denunciations of the incumbent civil officials that had been made by the local people. After that, he had ordered Michael to report back to him at the Infantry Division's Headquarters, but the G3 there had told Michael that Pavone had left the day before, leaving instructions for Michael to meet him in this town the next morning. A combined armoured and mechanized task force was to have reached the town by ten hundred hours and Pavone was to be with them.