J. Janes - Clandestine

* A lever that locks all the doors if the van is threatened.

* Tracking prices during the Occupation is exceedingly difficult, for they changed from year to year and place to place, hence best estimates for October 1943 are used.

Coming to a grove of beech, St-Cyr immediately began to gather a few of the nuts only to stop himself. He was now to the south of the ruins and much nearer to the Chemin des Dames. From its lower heights, he could look back out over the flat valley floor to see Hermann and then the van, the ruins running east-to-west to catch maximum sunlight whenever possible, for the Cistercians always built their abbeys this way and with plenty of water, forest and field. He could even follow the line of the hollow, now full of rainwater, that must mark the top of the once much deeper, timber-lined channel that would have conducted water from the Ailette to gristmill, forge, brewery, latrines and sawmill, and the ponds in which the monks would have raised the carp they ate instead of meat. But they would not have used that water for everything. He was, he realized, near the spring they would have visited daily for their drinking water and cooking. He could even hear it.

Uphill of him, the sodden ferns revealed cobbles in places that had once paved the former path, but had that girl known of the spring, had she run this way knowing there might be a grotto in which to hide from those two in the van?

Nothing was broken, nothing flattened. It was as if she had deliberately avoided leaving any such trace, and when he came to the spring, it poured readily over a flat, grey slab of limestone the monks could well have left in place.

Pausing to drink as he would have done in 1914 or 1917 had opportunity allowed, he rested a hand on the slab. Surprisingly, it moved ever so slightly, but …

‘Did you even come this far?’ he had to ask, and only then saw that she must have slipped away to his left to enter somewhat denser forest uphill. But she wasn’t there either. Instead, a good twenty metres from the spring, the single frond of very healthy fern among many had been hesitantly grasped and its top broken. No others had been damaged, but he was all but certain she had stood where he now was. Having heard the first of the shots, she had sought comfort in that touch and then, as the second shot had come, had instinctively snapped the frond and known exactly what must have happened.

Not until he returned to the edge of the encroaching forest, and with his back to the Chemin des Dames, did he find any further evidence.

She had stood here and waited, not knowing if she, too, would be killed.

Two healthy young saplings of hornbeam had been deliberately trampled. Of the two killings, the first he had examined had been the closer. The second had been all but across the ruins to the north and by that peripheral wall, which could only mean that she had run that way first and then had used that wall to hide her coming back and around the ruins to here and the spring. ‘But why leave such a trace, mademoiselle, when you already knew the location?’ Hermann had gone all but right around the ruins of the church and remains of its outbuildings, had even had a look at the bodies, for he was standing by the farthest, holding a corner of the tarp, had forced himself to do it. But if she hadn’t been a decoy, then what better way for her to get through the controls and into Paris unnoticed than by riding in the back of a bank van? Unless he was very mistaken, she couldn’t have known that it was going to be robbed, nor that those two would even think to turn on her.

Still feeling her former presence, he heard himself saying, ‘ Ah bon , mademoiselle, Joliot and his crew have finally arrived. The two who are with him can start looking for you in earnest then come back tomorrow with others and the dogs if needed. But if the killer didn’t shoot you, what then?’

Joliot’s faded dark-blue 1933 Peugeot 301 two-door didn’t have a firebox. Instead, having been fitted with a roof-top battery of fifteen-centimetre diameter metal tubes to hold the bottled producer-gas from the depot in Laon, it looked like a badly designed makeshift rocket launcher. One of the Russian ‘organs’ perhaps, their ‘little Kate’s’ from the tender song of such a girl, the banefully howling Katyusha.

When Hermann caught up with him, he said, ‘Yet another gazogene , Louis. That killer came in a heavily loaded one.’

More couldn’t be said.

‘Mes amis,’ shouted Joliot, who looked like a rake handle in stiff black tweed and a detachable snap-on collar that had been yanked at so hard Kohler could see that it had come loose. ‘ Putain de merde , Jean-Louis and Herr Kohler, the fart-gas that wretched old china vase of ours insists on gave the carburettor a hiccup and stopped me cold on the road. Me, I was patching a tire whose inner tube only Picasso would want for the variety and design of its innumerable patches. Profound apologies. Emergency repairs take time and these old hands, they can only do so much when that Victor of Verdun insists I pay the official eighty francs for a new inner tube that will be useless if I can get it, instead of the eight hundred of the marche noir where the availability and quality are almost, if not quite, as they used to be. What have you two for me this time, eh? More trouble?’

So many china vases had been made with Petain’s mug on them, the marechal had acquired that epithet, thought Kohler, but it was Louis who said, ‘Just the two for now, Theo. We need you to pin down the time, but there may also have been another. Garde champetre Rocheleau will be only too willing to show you where the first two are, and while you’re at it, Hermann and I will give the van another going over.’

‘Rocheleau, ah oui, oui , that one, he has the wife who is twenty years the younger and has not only ambitions for him but for herself. Me, I don’t envy him, even if she does have a figure fit for the gods and likes to display it. Father Adrien, their priest, simply lifts the eyes of despair and tosses the futile hand since the confessional, it is private and none of my business. No one comes here, Jean-Louis, yet suddenly there’s a robbery and two murders and we must have tourists who visit the Caverne du Dragon yesterday and happen upon the bodies when looking at the ruins here? Order is required, Herr Kohler. Order is what the Kommandant of Laon and others are insisting upon because of the robbery. Apparently having our police look after things is no longer any good, and even Herr Oberg in Paris is demanding that Vichy allow him to bring in good German police to oversee the whole 150,000 of the force, not just the 30,000 in Paris. Me, I happen to think they’re crazy but that the marechal and those people he has with him in Vichy had better agree since there are bound to be further such incidents, and spring is coming, n’est-ce pas ?’

Again the Allies and the invasion.

Boots, oilskin, hat, satchel and specs were adjusted, a hand lifted in salute as Rocheleau deferentially came to lead him away.

‘Joliot’s even wearing a two-franc Marianne, Louis, and the coins I’ve collected for you just aren’t the same.’

Back in 1940, the wearing of all such badges and pins, political or not, had been forbidden, but lately the young especially had taken to making protest buttons of the discontinued small coinage of the Troisieme Republique. ‘Theo’s six granddaughters know well enough that the head of Marianne and the cloth cap she wears are symbols of liberty. As one of the Occupier, Hermann, I expect you to say nothing beyond telling him that it brightens up such an atrocious suit.’

‘ Ach , no one but an idiot would ever challenge a coroner lest he find one looking over him.’