Maxim Jakubowski - Paris Noir

‘You’ve been drinking.’

‘For courage.’ A fragment of a smile shone on his handsome rosy-cheeked face. ‘My Kommandant wouldn’t like me to share this.’

She felt a wave of dizziness and looked down at her feet. Bread, cheese and slices of ham lay on a blanket on the floor. She’d only eaten a bowl of grey potatoes that day.

‘Hansi won’t tell about your friends.’

’My friends?’ She backed up, tripping on the pile of stones on the dirt floor. ‘Who told you?’

He grinned, his blue eyes glazed. ‘The redhead.’ He staggered against the wall. Young, only eighteen, two years older than her. ‘Hansi wants his girl.’

So La Rouquine informed on them, she realised d with a start, and the escape plan. And Hansi wanted La Rouquine. Now there’d be no more food. An irrational bolt of jealousy shot through her. No more of his kindness or the smile that lit up his eyes when he saw her.

She stiffened.

Waving his arm, he gestured to the food. ‘Eat. Then Hansi will teach you card game.’

’No, you have to go…’

She heard the creaking of the floorboards overhead, the cellar’s door opening. And she panicked. How could she explain this to the others, to her Hebrew teacher in hiding from the Germans?

But she knew how it would look finding her with a German soldier, taking his food. They’d accuse her of collaborating when all she’d been was hungry and keen to feel the kindness he’d shown her.

‘I think you are playing. You like Hansi.’

’I do… I mean I don’t… can’t.’

He smiled. A light lit in his eyes. ‘In the vaterland at school Hansi writes poetry. Now you inspire Hansi.’

And La Rouquine, did she inspire him, too?

‘You have to go. Now.’

Footsteps sounded on the stairs. She grabbed his hands, his warm hands, and pulled. If he didn’t leave the others would think she had betrayed their Resistance cell, sabotaged the tutor’s escape.

‘They’re coming, they can’t know… find you… please.’

He shook his blond head, folded his arms across his uniformed chest unbudging. ’ Nein . Hansi stay.’

This was going horribly wrong.

‘The redhead…’

That’s when she’d found the stone and smashed his head. Stupefied, he stumbled. She’d pounded his head again and again. Until his blood pooled in a puddle in the dirt, glinting in the candlelight.

‘Watch out.’ Lucien’s pick struck with a hard thud, then the bricks crumbled in a whoosh of billowing grey dust, revealing a hollow. Inside a mummified figure in the fragments of a Wehrmacht uniform leered with brown leathered lips, the dried-up hollow eye sockets open above pinched-in cheeks. The desiccated brown-skinned hands twisted as if clutching the wall.

Mina gasped in horror. Hansi, once handsome, was now a grotesque mummy.

‘Well preserved, eh?’ Lucien said. He reached for the gold swastika signet ring on Hansi’s pinkie. He pulled, and the finger came away with his ring.

The bile rose in Mina’s stomach.

‘Help me before he disintegrates more.’

Lucien lifted and together, with effort, they pulled the corpse out. Awkward, like holding a store dummy, and quite light except for the heavy boots and mouldering wool uniform disintegrating at their touch. Hansi’s stiff hands like claws poking out. ‘See a sergeant’s stripes,’ Lucien said. He and Mina pulled the garbage bag over it. The black jackboots protruded. Before they could put another garbage bag over them footsteps sounded.

‘Lucien?’ said a voice.

His red rheumy eyes batted in terror. ‘The concierge.’

Mina pushed him forward. ‘Get her back upstairs.’

An aproned woman in support hose, clogs and hair in a bun smiled. ‘Aaah, your friend…’

Lucien walked forward, blocking her view. ‘Jeanine…’

‘Good thing you came, your other friend came looking for you,’ she said, peering over his shoulder.

‘That’s strange, I haven’t lived here in years, Jeanine. Who?’

She shook her head. ‘A bourgeois matron, well dressed, red hair. But I didn’t give your address, I told her I’d tell you first.’

Mina’s heart pounded. La Rouquine! Her pills, she’d taken her blood pressure pills at breakfast but didn’t know if her heart would hold out.

‘Jeanine, I’ll meet you upstairs,’ Lucien said, ‘and settle what I owe for the locker.’

Lucien waited until her footsteps receded. ‘She’s curious. Put him back in.’

‘And have La Rouquine find him, she’s been here already!’ said Mina. ‘We’ll fit him in the bag, take it out the courtyard door to the trash.’

‘He’s too stiff, he won’t fit.’

‘Then break his legs, Lucien,’ she said, in exasperation.

Mina turned away at the sight of Lucien leaning on the corpse’s shoulders, the brittle sounds of breaking bones. She shone the flashlight in the gaping hole. She saw what looked like old blankets and fished around with the flashlight. A black spider skittered across a man’s old-fashioned brown shoe with a raised heel. She pulled the rotting blanket apart, saw a trousered leg inside. And she screamed.

‘Shut up.’

‘Who else did you kill, Lucien?’

Lucien’s shoulders shook. And a single tear slid down his cheek. He pulled the blanket aside. Black hair drooped over a desiccated brown face, a hunched figure in brown rags.

‘But I don’t understand,’ Mina said, bewildered. ‘I helped you brick up the wall…’

‘La Rouquine said she slept with the German to save her family,’ Lucien said. ‘She lied. Never did it.’

‘What? But I thought…’

‘Everyone did. She was protecting her club-footed father, who worked next door in the Germans’ warehouse. He took deportees’ jewellery and sold it on the black market.’

Her heart thudded at the revelation. She’d got it all wrong. Mina swallowed hard. ‘You mean…’

‘You took our teacher to the canal barge and we finished bricking him up,’ Lucien interrupted. ‘But La Rouquine showed up, made excuses and beat a quick exit. Later her father came down to his locker, he saw the blood.’

‘And then?’ Mina stared at the corpse’s twisted foot.

‘Her father threatened first to turn us in to the Kommandantur, then to blackmail us.’

‘Never. He was a Jew!’

Lucien shook his head, venom in his eyes. ‘Non, only her poor mother. He had a club foot, that’s the trouble. Too easy to identify.’

‘You killed her father and bricked him up, too?’

‘Like you said, either him or us,’ he said.

Her shoulders crumpled in shame. She averted her eyes, regret filling her. But she couldn’t tell Lucien the truth.

‘Mina, you remember the Wehrmacht patrols on the street,’ Lucien said. ‘What choice did we have?’

She struggled, pulling more bricks away. ‘Hurry, before the busybody comes back.’

‘I lied to her mother, to everyone in the building.’ Lucien kicked the dirt. ‘I looked them in the face every day! And I’m still lying. Now La Rouquine’s going to find him. It’s prison!’

‘Be quiet,’ Mina said, now determined. ‘Get him in the bag, then keep the concierge busy, then it’s out in the courtyard. I’m calling my grandson.’

Lucien refused and collapsed against the wall, staring with a vacant look. She stood by the staircase and punched in her grandson’s number. Only his answering machine. Why didn’t these young ones ever answer their cell phones?

In the end Mina manoeuvred the stiff hunched figure of the father into the bag, wrapped it with duct tape. Her breathing grew laboured, coming in short gasps. The air was a miasma of dense dampness, the odour of desiccated corpses and rotting wool.