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.
CHAPTER THIRTY
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.
It was eleven o'clock now, and apart from a small sign that read WATER POINT in English, with an arrow, there was no hint that anyone speaking English had been there since 1919.
'Come on, Bo,' Keane said. 'What're we waiting for? I want to see Paris.'
'We don't have Paris,' Michael said, putting the map away, and trying to make some sense out of the empty streets before him.
'I heard over the BBC this morning,' Keane said, 'that the Germans've asked for an armistice in Paris.'
'Well, they haven't asked me,' Michael said, sorry that Pavone wasn't with him at this moment to take on the burden of responsibility. The last three days had been pleasant, riding round the festive French countryside as commander of his own movements, with no one to order him about. But there was no celebrating going on here this morning, that was certain, and he had an uneasy sensation that if he guessed wrong in the next fifteen minutes, they might all be dead by noon.
'The hell with it.' Michael nudged Stellevato. 'Let's see what's happening at the Water Point.'
Stellevato started the jeep and they went slowly down a side street towards a bridge they could see in the distance, crossing a small stream. There was another sign there, and a big canvas tank and pumping apparatus. For a moment, Michael thought that the Water Point, together with the rest of the town, was deserted, but he saw a helmet sticking cautiously up from a foxhole covered with branches.
'We heard the motor,' said the soldier under the helmet. He was pale and weary-eyed, young and, as far as Michael could tell, frightened. Another soldier stood up next to him and came over to the jeep.
'What's going on here?' Michael asked.
'You tell us,' said the first soldier.
'Did a task force go through here at ten o'clock this morning?'
'Nothing's been through here,' the second soldier volunteered. He was a pudgy little man, nearly forty, who needed a shave badly, and he spoke with a hint of a Swedish singsong in his voice. 'Fourth Armoured Headquarters went through last night and dropped us off here and turned south. Since then it's been lonely. There was some shooting near dawn from the middle of the town…'
'What was it?' Michael asked.
'Don't ask me, Brother,' said the pudgy man. 'They put me here to pump water out of this creek, not to conduct private investigations. These woods're full of Krauts and they shoot the Frogs and the Frogs shoot them.
