Lev gave him a hard look. ‘You’re learning, though.’
He was talking about the scene with the razor. Maybe I am learning to scare people, Greg thought.
Lev said: ‘Why are you showing me these photos?’
‘I thought you might like to know that you have a grandson.’
‘By a goddamn two-bit actress who was hoping to snag herself a rich man!’
Marga said: ‘Darling! Please remember that I was a two-bit nightclub singer hoping to snag myself a rich man.’
He looked furious. For a moment he glared at Marga. Then his expression changed. ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘You’re right. Who am I to judge Jacky Jakes?’
Greg and Marga stared at him, astonished at this sudden humility.
He said: ‘I’m just like her. I was a two-kopek hoodlum from the slums of St Petersburg until I married Olga Vyalov, my boss’s daughter.’
Greg caught his mother’s eye, and she gave an almost imperceptible shrug that simply said:
Lev looked again at the photo. ‘Apart from the colour, this kid looks like my brother, Grigori. There’s a surprise. Until now I thought all these piccaninnies looked the same.’
Greg could hardly breathe. ‘Will you see him, father? Will you come with me and meet your grandson?’
‘Hell, yes.’ Lev uncorked the bottle, poured vodka into three glasses, and passed them round. ‘What’s the boy’s name, anyway?’
‘Georgy.’
Lev raised his glass. ‘So here’s to Georgy.’
They all drank.
15
1943 (I)
Lloyd Williams walked along a narrow uphill path at the tail end of a line of desperate fugitives.
He breathed easily. He was used to this. He had now crossed the Pyrenees several times. He wore rope-soled espadrilles that gave his feet a better grip on the rocky ground. He had a heavy coat on top of his blue overalls. The sun was hot now but later, when the party reached higher altitudes and the sun went down, the temperature would drop below freezing.
Ahead of him were two sturdy ponies, three local people, and eight weary, bedraggled escapers, all loaded with packs. There were three American airmen, the surviving crew of a B-24 Liberator bomber that had crash-landed in Belgium. Two more were British officers who had escaped from the Oflag 65 prisoner-of-war camp in Strasbourg. The others were a Czech Communist, a Jewish woman with a violin, and a mysterious Englishman called Watermill who was probably some kind of spy.
They had all come a long way and suffered many hardships. This was the last leg of their journey, and the most dangerous. If captured now, they would all be tortured until they betrayed the brave men and women who had helped them en route.
Leading the party was Teresa. The climb was hard work for people who were not used to it, but they had to keep up a brisk pace to minimize their exposure, and Lloyd had found that the refugees were less likely to fall behind when they were led by a small, ravishingly pretty woman.
The path levelled and broadened into a small clearing. Suddenly a loud voice rang out. Speaking French with a German accent, it shouted: ‘Halt!’
The column came to an abrupt halt.
Two German soldiers emerged from behind a rock. They carried standard Mauser bolt-action rifles, each holding five rounds of ammunition.
Reflexively Lloyd touched the overcoat pocket that contained his loaded 9mm Luger pistol.
Escaping from mainland Europe had become harder, and Lloyd’s job had grown even more dangerous. At the end of last year the Germans had occupied the southern half of France, contemptuously ignoring the Vichy French government like the flimsy sham it had always been. A forbidden zone ten miles deep was declared all along the frontier with Spain. Lloyd and his party were in that zone now.
Teresa addressed the soldiers in French. ‘Good morning, gentlemen. Is everything all right?’ Lloyd knew her well, and he could hear the tremor of fear in her voice, but he hoped it was too faint for the sentries to notice.
Among the French police there were many Fascists and a few Communists, but all of them were lazy, and none wanted to chase refugees across the icy passes of the Pyrenees. However, the Germans did. German troops had moved into border towns and begun to patrol the hill paths and mule trails Lloyd and Teresa used. The occupiers were not crack troops: those were fighting in Russia, where they had recently surrendered Stalingrad after a long and murderous struggle. Many of the Germans in France were old men, boys, and the walking wounded. But that seemed to make them more determined to prove themselves. Unlike the French, they rarely turned a blind eye.
Now the older of the two soldiers, cadaverously thin with a grey moustache, said to Teresa: ‘Where are you going?’
‘To the village of Lamont. We have groceries for you and your comrades.’
