Butcher and Bolt Read online

  ‘Isn’t that a bit exposed?’ asked Joe, looking up from the map, ‘it looks like it’s on a main road.’

  ‘It is on a main road,’ said The Corsican, ‘but we have a warehouse here on Rue Novion, and there is a tunnel under the road that leads directly to it. We will have four trucks waiting to take the load and a dozen men to carry. I estimate we can empty the barge in two hours and have the trucks back in the warehouse by 4.30am. Once in we can unload them at our leisure.’

  ‘So what happens if a German foot patrol or river boat comes past while we’re unloading?’ asked Joe.

  The Corsican shrugged, ‘Paris is a big city, there’s no reason for them to be patrolling this area at 2am, the chances are small.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Joe, ‘what’s the plan if it happens, shoot our way out? What sort of weapons have you got? How many lookouts will you post and where?’

  The Corsican looked up from the map, pulled a thin cigar from his shirt pocket and struck a match. He took a deep drag on the cigarillo and blew the smoke in Joe’s face.

  ‘Seeing you know so much about it, why don’t you tell us?’

  Joe ignored the insult and studied the map.

  ‘I’ll need to see the area in daylight, but covering the land approaches is the tricky part. We’ll be able to hear a boat coming a long way off and get out of sight, but a foot patrol could come from just about anywhere. Aren’t you concerned that the location is too close to the dock? When they notice the barge missing they’ll search the closest places first. What are you planning to do with the barge?’

  ‘That’s where you come in,’ said a tall man with a scar dividing his right cheek who had been introduced as Claude, ‘when it’s empty you’re going to take it back where it came from.’

  ‘What? That’s madness!’ exclaimed Joe, ‘stealing the barge in the first place is dangerous enough, but taking it back?’

  ‘We assume the Germans will not notice it has gone missing at all. By the time they look into it and discover it is empty, we’ll be long gone.’

  ‘You may well be, but I’ll be stuck at the bloody docks,’ said Joe. ‘How the hell am I supposed to get out?’

  ‘We will bring a small boat to the quay,’ said Claude, ‘you tie it to the stern of the barge and once you’ve returned it you simply row back here.’

  ‘It’ll take me at least an hour to row that far,’ said Joe, ‘the sun will be coming up.’

  The Frenchman shrugged, ‘So you will be a fisherman rowing on the Seine at dawn, it’s a common-enough sight. The curfew ends at sun-up, you have no reason to be suspected of anything.’

  ‘And to ensure your diligence, we will be keeping the lovely Alouette nice and safe here,’ said l’Hydre, entering the room with the giant Jean-Paul shadowing him.

  ‘Where is she?’ asked Joe. When they had left the cellar and gone back upstairs to the office, Madam Legrand had returned and asked Yvette if she wanted to use the bathroom. Half an hour had passed and she hadn’t returned.

  ‘She’s perfectly safe I assure you,’ said l’Hydre.

  ‘Not in that bloody cellar!’ yelled Joe, his blood boiling.

  ‘Non. She is with Sophie. They have much to discuss. A single Jewish girl alone in Paris is in a vulnerable position, open to exploitation by all sorts of unscrupulous people.’

  The grey man smiled, a thin, ugly expression that sat awkwardly beneath the thin moustache. He removed his glasses, breathed on them and rubbed them on his sleeve.

  ‘She could be of great value to us, and besides, where can she go?’ asked the man. ‘Back to England with you? A dangerous journey for one in her delicate condition.’

  ‘What do you mean delicate?’ asked Joe.

  ‘You mean she hasn’t told you?’ the man laughed, ‘why she’s pregnant you poor fool, I assume the child is yours?’

  Joe’s head spun and the blood drained from his face. Pregnant? How could she not have told him? Of course, he would never have agreed to take her with him to Paris if he’d known. All those visits to the bathroom, had she been throwing up all this time? God he was blind, blind to the most fundamental detail of the woman he loved.

  He looked at the men in the room. The Corsican, puffing on his cigar; Claude, stooped over the map looking up at him; l’Hydre, smirking beneath his moustache, and behind him the ever-present Jean-Paul. How had he ended up in this place? Was he insane pursuing this mission at all costs? He needed to get it done and get Yvette out of here.

  ‘Let’s get this over with,’ said Joe, ‘when do we go?’

  ‘Tonight,’ said Claude, ‘everything is prepared. Of course this means you won’t see the lay of the land in daylight, so, working from the map, where would you place your lookouts?’

  Joe forced Yvette from his mind and stared at the map. ‘Think man,’ he said to himself, ‘think like a German. Where would you be coming from?’

  ‘Where’s the nearest German barracks?’ he asked.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Sophie Legrand closed the door behind her and looked at the girl.

  ‘So, what is your name my dear?’ she asked.

  Yvette looked around the cupboard-sized room. It was utilitarian and contained just a bed. The yellowing wallpaper peeled from the walls in strips and a single bare bulb hung from a cord in the ceiling. The sort of room no-one slept in; the sort of room where whores earnt their money the hard way; a room no-one noticed or remembered.

  ‘Alouette. What’s yours?’ replied the girl.

  She was a beautiful creature, no doubt about that, thought Sophie, but that was definitely a bump in her midriff. Sophie Legrand was an expert at assessing young women. She had interviewed hundreds of them since the war began, most of them desperate to earn money any way they could. This one was clearly different. She carried her head with pride and had a fierce kind of light in her eyes. Sophie wondered if she’d ever killed a man. She had an air of aggression about her that said “Don’t touch me if you value your life”, that was like a perfume to Sophie.

  ‘My name is Sophie Legrand,’ said Sophie, ‘and you, my dear, just got lucky.’

  ‘Lucky?’ said Yvette, ‘how exactly?’

  ‘Let me try a few guesses about you, hmm? You’re from the north, I can tell by your accent, from Roubaix it would seem, from what your Australian friend has said. You’re Jewish, aren’t you? That black curly hair is a clear giveaway. You’ve come to Paris with your lover to kill a particular German officer, so you must be obsessed with revenge for something done to you or your family. You’ve probably already killed someone, a German most likely, so that makes you a murderess in their eyes, you’ve got nowhere to go, and on top of all of that, you’re pregnant.’

  At this last statement, Yvette started violently.

  ‘What makes you say that?’ she demanded angrily.

  ‘Oh darling, in this business you quickly learn to recognise the signs. You have a small enough bump, but your skin is glowing, you unconsciously touch your stomach every few minutes, and when you went to the toilet just now I heard you throwing up. Whose is it? The Ossie? Or don’t you know?’

  Yvette slumped onto the bed. The strain of the last few days was telling on her. Nothing in Paris had turned out to be as simple as they’d hoped, and now they were in this club with who knew what sort of disreputable people. Who could she trust? She stiffened herself and stood up.

  ‘It’s none of your business,’ she said, ‘we only came here because a friend said you could help us.’

  Sophie Legrand smiled. A tough one this, she’d take a bit of breaking, and if she wasn’t sure of the child’s father, it was possible she didn’t care much about the child either. Opportunities flitted through Sophie’s mind. She could make a lot of money out of this girl. The Germans would eat her up at top price, she knew that, but she would rather she went to the work willingly than having to break her in the cell the way they’d had to with some of the other hard-cases
. Sophie Legrand didn’t have much sympathy for anyone, but the process of chaining the girls in the basement, having Jean-Paul and The Corsican rape and beat them several times a day, and injecting them with heroin until they were addicted was not something she wanted to repeat unless absolutely necessary. Apart from anything else, it meant the girls couldn’t work until the bruises mended.

  ‘Listen mon cher,’ said Sophie quietly, ‘even if l’Hydre were to help your boyfriend find this German, what then? You can’t be on the run in France, let alone pregnant and on the run. The Germans are everywhere. Surely you can see where this absurd mission of his is going to end? If you can’t I’ll tell you: in a ditch with a bullet in your brain, or in a concentration camp. You need to make a decision now about whether you survive the next few days.’

  Yvette said nothing. She knew the woman was right, but she had no idea what to do. She had been so single-minded, so consumed with vengeance that she hadn’t thought about the future at all, past getting to Richter. Even if they got him and took him to the coast, what then? Assuming they could even find a boat, did she want to go to England with Joe? The last time they had faced this question only months before she had opted to stay in France, and with hindsight that had been a big mistake. But what awaited her in England? A lone, pregnant Frenchwoman with no visible means of support, and Jewish to boot. She had no illusions that the British were particularly fond of Jews, no-one was. She had relatives in the south of France, her mother’s cousin Angelique, who had left Roubaix long ago and married a man who had land in the hills near the Italian border. She knew she would take her in. Apart from her there was no-one she could turn to, and she couldn’t return to Calais or Roubaix, the Germans might recognise her and arrest her.

  She looked at the woman standing before her. Her velvet dress and heavy make-up looked absurd under the glare of the bulb, though she guessed it had the right effect in a dark and smoky nightclub. She must have been beautiful once, but time and a tough life had eaten away at her looks. Crow’s feet ensnared her eyes, and a vertical frown line divided her forehead. She imagined that this woman was as hard as nails and couldn’t care less whether she survived the next few days or not.

  ‘What’s it to you anyway?’ she asked.

  ‘Well Alouette,’ said Madam Legrand soothingly, ‘I can help you in several ways. First, I can help you get rid of that thing in your belly, tomorrow if you like. Second, I can give you a job, and third I can protect you from the Germans and the worst of what is yet to come in this war.’

  ‘How can you protect me from the Germans?’ Yvette asked.

  ‘False papers,’ said Madam Legrand, ‘among his men l’Hydre has an expert forger. We can turn you into anyone we like and give you a long Aryan pedigree that will satisfy any Jew-hunter.’

  ‘And this job, what would I be expected to do?’ asked Yvette.

  Madam Legrand knew this was the critical moment. She had to convince this girl that she didn’t face a life of forcible prostitution if she came to work for l’Hydre.

  ‘A girl like you could be useful to l’Hydre,’ she replied, and as she said it she realised it was true. This girl was clearly intelligent and resourceful, and she guessed quite ruthless when necessary. Watched carefully she could add a dimension to l’Hydre’s team that was sorely lacking: a female agent, a woman who could do more than lie on her back and earn German scrip.

  ‘How so?’ asked Yvette suspiciously, ‘I’m no dancer, and I’m no whore. I’ll kill myself before anyone forces me to sleep with a German again.’

  Again eh? thought Madam Legrand. Interesting.

  ‘No one will force you to do anything of the kind,’ said Madam Legrand, ‘I think your talents lie in other areas. Most of the girls here are pathetically stupid. Peasants with no education., whereas you are clearly well-educated. I don’t suppose you speak German by any chance?’

  ‘Yes, I do, fluently,’ replied Yvette. ‘I can read and write it as well, I studied archaeology, and a lot of the research was done by Germans.’

  ‘Well then you see, you would be invaluable to l’Hydre both as an assistant and as a liaison with the Germans. He does a lot of business with them ... by necessity,’ she added quickly as she saw the girl’s cheeks flare, ‘and this gives us unique opportunities to damage their war effort and undermine them.’

  This last was rubbish of course. L’Hydre’s operation was based purely on profit—patriotism didn’t enter into it—but no doubt they could fool her for a while at least, until they had some other hold over her.

  ‘Look at the operation your man is on tonight, they are recovering weapons and ammunition intended for our resistance fighters that the Germans have intercepted.’

  ‘Resistance fighters?’ asked Yvette, looking up eagerly, ‘you mean there’s a resistance in Paris?’

  That was when Madam Legrand knew she had her.

  ‘It is only in its infancy,’ replied Madam Legrand, ‘but with our help it will grow rapidly. You could be a part of it. ‘l’Hydre will tell you more about it tomorrow, tonight I’d like you to watch the proceedings in the club. We have a discreet observation window overlooking the main room. You can familiarise yourself with the German officers who come in. It will be useful to you in the future to know who they are and what they do.’

  ‘What about Richter, will he be here?’ asked Yvette.

  ‘Perhaps he will, ‘said Madam Legrand smoothly, ‘I don’t know this man by name, do you know when he arrived in the city?’

  ‘Only in the last week,’ said Yvette.

  ‘And what unit is he with?’ asked the madam.

  ‘He’s a Hauptsturmfuhrer with the Totenkopf Division,’ said Yvette.

  ‘In that case we will see him soon enough,’ said the madam, ‘this is the favourite club for the SS in all of Paris, they’ve even nicknamed it “Der Delikatessen” I hear.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Yvette.

  ‘Because there is such a delectable range of goods to choose from,’ said Madam Legrand, rolling her eyes, ‘and we are open seven nights a week. Do you see Yvette what a superb cover a nightclub is for a resistance operation? All the senior German officers come here, and some of our less stupid girls have become quite adept at loosening their tongues. As a result we know all the units stationed in Paris and the locations and movements of dozens more around France. We are the nerve centre, and you can be a part of it. Observe tonight and let me know your thoughts in the morning. Now come and have something to eat then rest, you must be exhausted.’

  ~ ~ ~

  The plan to steal the barge was simple. Almost too simple, Joe thought. It relied on one fact: a section of the fence that surrounded the port had collapsed near where the barge was moored, and the Germans hadn’t got around to repairing it yet. Security at the port was scant, as nearly all the former French nightwatchmen had enlisted when the war started and were now dead, wounded, or in captivity. Besides, with France conquered, what need was there to guard a port in Paris?

  Consequently, the gang’s plan was to move into place in a nearby abandoned warehouse before the curfew. At 2am they would sneak out, cross the fence, unmoor the barge and sail it around to the quay on the other side of the peninsular created by the Seine’s loop. Joe had suggested the simplest plan of just driving the truck in and unloading the barge, but the French had thought that too risky, so now he was part of a far more complicated plan. He could think of a dozen things that could go wrong, but he didn’t have any knowledge of the lay of the land, and after all, he was only there so he would know where to dock the barge when the operation was over.

  The warehouse was dusty and the concrete floor cold. Joe found an old bench seat with the slats half broken off and tried to get some sleep. It was a pointless exercise, his mind was racing and the slats of the bench dug into his shoulders. He tried to calm his breathing and focus on what he had to do. The most important thing was to get a solid bearing once the barge was out in the main stream so
he would know where he was on the return journey.

  After an hour of remonstrating with himself for joining the commandos in the first place, he managed to slow his mind down to a level below panic. If he was caught by the Germans again he was in for a rough time. They’d probably work out who he was eventually and shoot him. Hell, they’d probably shoot him even if they never worked out he wasn’t French. All this just to bring back this man Richter. Joe thought about the Nazi, forced his mind back to the farmyard at Le Paradis, the awful sewing-machine ripple of the machine guns as they tore into the defenceless men of the Norfolk regiment. The screams of the dying and the series of single shots as the Germans worked their way through the bodies, finishing off those who were still alive, then silence. It was nothing short of a miracle that he and Smythe had survived and managed to make it to Dunkirk. Joe shuddered at the risks they’d taken, especially the ride on the motorbike through the German lines when he’d been distracted by trying to kill Richter.

  And yet here he was, after the bastard again. And Yvette was pregnant for God’s sake. Was the child his? She hadn’t said much about what had happened to her after the British had retreated, but her silence and her refusal to let him touch her spoke volumes. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it except for a fierce sense of protectiveness that made him want to get her out of this God-forsaken country once and for all, her objections be damned. How could she possibly stay now?

  The hours dragged and he must have dozed off, because suddenly he was being shaken awake in the dark.

  ‘Time to go Ossie,’ came the rough voice of The Corsican.

  Outside it was black. A crescent moon gave a thin gleam illuminating the outlines of the buildings and barges in the port, but the shadows were deep and sinister. Perfect conditions for a bit of clandestine work, thought Joe as he, Claude and The Corsican dashed across the exposed road and were swallowed up in the gloom.