The Collaborators

Now…

Noise confirmed his intuition. Footsteps; steel on marble; regular, swift; certain.

The trembling in his legs grew wilder and wilder. It was beginning to spread through the whole of his body, must surely be evident now in his arms, his shoulders, his face. He tried to control it but couldn’t, and prayed, not out of fear but shame, that they would not after all find him.

But now the steps were close. Doors opening and shutting. And at last, his.

In that self-same moment the trembling stopped.

It was the young soldier who looked in who showed the shock of his discovery, clearly taken aback to find anyone here.

‘Yes?’ said Valois testily.

The young man levelled his rifle, turned his head and called, ‘Sir! Here’s someone!’

More footsteps, then a middle-aged warrant officer came into the room, pushing the soldier’s rifle up with irritation.

‘Who the hell are you?’ he said in execrable French.

‘Valois. Junior Secretary, Ministry of Finance.’

‘You what? I thought this was a museum. Where’s all the pictures?’

‘That’s another part of the Palace. This wing holds the Ministry of Finance.’

‘Does it, now? Don’t suppose you keep any money here, though!’ the man laughed.

Valois did not reply.

‘No. Thought not. All right. Don’t go away. Someone may want to talk to you.’

Turning to the soldier, the man commanded, ‘Stay on guard outside!’

The soldier left. The warrant officer gave the mockery of a salute. ‘Carry on with your work, Monsieur Valois,’ he said smiling.

Then he was gone.

Valois slowly relaxed. The trembling was starting again, but less violently now. He felt a sudden surge of exultation through his body.

He had seen the enemy face to face and had not flinched.

But best of all, he had felt the upwelling of such a powerful hatred that it must surely spring from a reservoir deep enough to sustain him through the long, bitter and dangerous struggle that lay ahead. He’d been right not to flee to Bordeaux or even England. Here was where the real resistance to the Boche would start. Whatever the future held for France, the worst it could hold for Christian Valois was a hero’s death.

Suddenly he felt a surge of something much stronger than exultation move through his body. He rose and hurried to the door. The young soldier regarded him with alarm and brought his rifle up.

Making a desperate and humiliating mime, Christian pushed past him. There were driving forces stronger than either terror or patriotism. He was discovering a truth rarely revealed in song or saga, that even heroes have to crap.

PART TWO

June-December 1940

Fuyez les bois et les fontaines Taisez-vous oiseaux querelleurs Vos chants sont mis en quarantaines C’est le règne de l’oiseleur Je reste roi de mes douleurs

Louis Aragon, Richard II

1

There was no getting away from it, thought Günter Mai. Even for an Abwehr lieutenant who was more likely to see back alleys than front lines, it was nice to be a conqueror. Not nice in a brass-banded, jack-booted, Sieg Heiling sort of way. But nice to be here in this lovely city, in this elegant bedroom in this luxurious hotel which for the next five? ten? twenty? years would be the Headquarters of Military Intelligence in Paris.

He gazed out across the sun-gilt rooftops to the distant mast of the Eiffel Tower and saluted the view with his pipe.

‘Thank you, Paris,’ he said.

Behind him someone coughed, discreet as a waiter, but when he turned he saw it was his section head, Major Bruno Zeller.

‘Good morning, Günter,’ said the elegant young man. ‘I missed you at breakfast. Can my keeper be ill, I asked myself.’

‘Morning, sir. I wasn’t too hungry after last night’s celebration.’

‘You mean you ate as well as drank?’ said Zeller lounging gracefully on to the bed. ‘You amaze me. Now tell me, do you recall a man called Pajou?’

Mai’s normally round, amiable face lengthened into a scowl. A hangover reduced his Zeller-tolerance dramatically. In his late twenties, he had long got over the irritation of having to ‘sir’ someone several years his junior. Such things happened, particularly if you were the son of an assistant customs officer in Offenburg and ‘sir’ was heir to some turreted castle overhanging the Rhine, not to mention a distant relative of Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr.

But that didn’t entitle the cheeky child to wander at will into your bedroom and lie across your bed!

‘Pajou. Now let me see,’ said Mai. Yes, of course, he remembered him well. But having remembered, it now suited him to play the game at his speed. From his dressing-table he took a thick black book. It was an old Hitler Jugend Tagebuch which he’d never found any use for till he started in intelligence work. Now, filled with minuscule, illegible writing, it was the repository of all he knew. He guessed Zeller would pay highly for a fair transcript. He saw the young man’s long, manicured fingers beat an impatient tattoo on the counterpane. The movement caught the light on his heavy silver signet ring, reminding Mai of another source of irritation. The signet was the family heraldic device, basically a Zed crossed by a hunting horn. On first noticing it, Mai had remarked unthinkingly that he had seen a similar device on some brass buttons which he thought came from a coat belonging to his grandfather. Zeller had returned from his next visit to his widowed mother delighted with the news, casually introduced, that there had been an under-keeper called Mai working on the family’s Black Forest estate till he’d gone off to Offenburg to better himself. ‘And here’s his grandson, still working for the family in a manner of speaking! Strange how these things work out, eh, Günter?’

Thereafter he often referred to Mai as ‘my keeper’, though it had to be said he didn’t share the joke with other people.

Mai took it all in good part - except when he had a hangover. Basically he quite liked the young major. Also there were other shared pieces of knowledge which dipped the scales of power in his favour.

One, unusable except in the direst emergency, was that Zeller was as queer as a kosher Nazi and was no doubt already looking for some Gallic soulmate to criminally waste his precious Aryan seed on.

Another, and more important for everyday working, was that Mai was twice as good at the job as his boss, though Zeller compensated by taking twice the credit.

He began to read from the book.

‘Pajou, Alphonse. Worked for the National Armaments Company. I recruited him in Metz in ‘38. No political commitment, in it purely for the money. Got greedy, took risks and got caught. Tried and gaoled just before the war. Lucky for him. Any later and he’d have got the guillotine. So, what about him?’

‘It seems he got an early release, unofficially I guess, and would like to make it official by re-entering our employ. He’s not very trusting, however. The duty sergeant says he insisted on dealing with you when he rang earlier this morning.’

‘Why didn’t he put the call through then?’ asked Mai.

‘The sergeant says that you left instructions last night that you weren’t to be disturbed by anything less than a call from the Führer and not even then if he wanted to transfer the charge.’

Mai grimaced behind a puff of smoke.

‘Sorry about that, sir. Look, I’m not sure Pajou’s the kind of man we want just now. Basically he’s a nasty piece of work and he’s not even a native Parisian. What we ought to be doing now, before the first shock fades and people begin to take notice, is establishing a network of nice ordinary citizens who’ll feed us with intelligence just for the sake of reassurance that the dreadful Hun is a nice ordinary chap like themselves.’