Authors: Robert Ryan
‘Then do me a favour.’
‘What?’
‘Stop using that stupid car.’
Williams laughed out loud. ‘Stupid?’
‘It’s stupid to be seen in. Anywhere. Anytime.’
‘That car could save our lives.’
‘Or it could get you killed. I know Robert is reckless, but he really doesn’t need a partner in idiocy.’
Williams ran through the task they had been given by Rose, and, it was true, speed was not going to be essential. Robert’s argument would be this: driving fast cars is what we do, have always done. But Eve’s was the wiser counsel. ‘We’ll give it a try. This time.’
Eve kissed him, hugged his chest again and said quietly, ‘Thank you. And I’m sorry about the other night.’
Williams led her by the hand into their room across the landing and lowered her on to the bed. ‘I’m sorry too.’
She looked up at him and smiled. ‘Show me …’
The Alphachem offices at St Just were located upwind of the actual chemical plant, so that the exposure of the clerks and managers to the vile odours and eye-stinging emissions were minimised. The building wasn’t anything grand, just a concrete box, really, but within Raymond Berri had insisted on an office every bit as well appointed as if he had been on the Champs Elysées. Heavy red curtains, leather sofas, a big desk, a wonderful padded swivel chair. The picture of him painted by Orpen had pride of place on one wall. Thinner in those days and grander. For the last five years he’d been climbing back up through Alphachem. Now he could climb no more. From the window he could see the single track rail spur that came from the mainline east of Paris and where, once a week or more, a train of boxcars would shunt down to pick up a consignment of delousing powder.
At least, that was what the inventory said. For weeks, no, months, now Berri had been having doubts, ever since he had taken a closer look at the trains and heard the heart-stopping noises from within. Sobbing. Babies crying. Low moans. The hacking of sick people. Human misery in small parcels of sound.
Whatever it was he wanted no part of it and had said so to the man sitting opposite him, Georges Legine, the owner of the company and therefore his boss.
Georges took a cigar, clipped it and lit it. ‘Raymond. The things is, if we don’t do it, someone else will. And someone else will make millions of francs a month. And we’ll have lost that for what? Some vague liberal unease on your part.’ He waved the cigar dismissively and exhaled. ‘It’s madness.’
‘It’s collaboration.’
‘Oh, Raymond. You make it sound like a dirty word. Didn’t Petain himself use the term? Everyone collaborates. It’s just a matter of degree. Should you boycott the baker who serves Germans? Or the butcher? You’d starve if you started applying such criteria. I consider what we are doing as the necessary business to stay alive. There is only one customer now, Raymond—Germany. We supply or die.’
‘There are Jews on those trains.’
‘So? What concern is it of ours?’
Raymond cleared his throat. ‘I am Jewish. At least, one of my grandparents was. In some people’s eyes that is enough to get me a corner of a cattle truck.’
‘Is that why you went to the Resistance?’
It hit Raymond like a slap and he squirmed in the chair, causing the leather to squeak. It was true. One of the foremen from before the war had been a vocal communist. Raymond was sure he would be part of this Franc-Tireurs et Partisans outfit. He’d tracked him down in Senlis and, although admitting nothing, the foreman promised he’d speak to ‘some people’. Raymond regained his composure. ‘Nonsense.’
‘You know there is a rumour that Rene Peugeot sabotaged his own works. I wouldn’t want anything like that to happen here, Raymond.’
The door opened and the swarthy officer called Meyer, who co-ordinated the Alphachem shipments with the Drancy trains, entered without knocking, two German soldiers flanking him. Berri heard the high whistle of the approaching train. He suddenly realised what was happening.
‘I don’t suppose I’ll need to pack?’ he said quietly.
Meyer shook his head.
Berri grabbed a fistful of cigars from the box and stuffed them in his inside pocket. Georges Legine shrugged, an it’s-your-own-fault gesture of reasonableness and Berri walked out with his escort to find his place in the scruffy, rattling cattle trucks now slowly snaking past the window into the works’ sidings.
Williams and Robert stepped out of the small car, aware of the stares of workers and German guards. The train had just pulled in and now sat four hundred metres down the track, huffing and hissing impatiently, dwarfed by the knotted steel pipework of the chemical complex and its cavernous storage warehouses. The pair were absolutely calm. Their documents said they were railways safety inspectors for the SNCF. And the documents were entirely genuine, thanks to Ettore Bugatti, who used his contacts in the industry to secure the real thing, official stamps and all.
Robert carried the blimped case, held as casually as he could, finger on the trigger which would start the film rolling. He had to use it sparingly, as there was only around five minutes of actual film time on it. He asked directions to the office from one of the workers and they entered a rather stark reception room, with a desk and two threadbare chairs. The receptionist, a small, balloon-faced woman in her fifties, was eyeing them suspiciously. Williams flashed his ID. ‘SNCF Inspectorate. Can we see Monsieur Berri please?’
‘Monsieur Berri is no longer with us,’ said the receptionist.
‘Really?’ said Robert, puzzled. They had been given the name only last week, and Williams was convinced it was Orpen’s old friend, a man he was sure they could trust. ‘So who is in charge?’
‘That would be our chairman, Monsieur Georges Legine. I shall tell him you’re here. Do you have an appointment?’
‘This is a snap inspection,’ said Williams with as much SNCF-style pomposity as he could muster. ‘Having an appointment would rather defeat the object. We’ll be outside.’
They left the building and walked across to the track, slowly following it down towards the train, a ragbag of scabrous mismatched trucks. They could see a clump of German guards, including a couple on the roof of the train, all brandishing submachine guns. Williams concentrated on getting his stride as easy and unworried as possible. Robert bent down to brush his shoe and came up with a small square of paper he had palmed. After a few more metres he unwrapped it, studied the contents and passed it across to Williams.
The writing was tiny, spidery and very, very young.
I was picked up in the street in Toulouse on 12 July by the police. Held in a gymnasium there and transported to a big place called Drancy. It is near Paris. Am now on a train travelling east. Whoever gets this, please tell my parents I am alive. They will reward you. They are at 7 rue Pergola in Toulouse. There is no phone. Please write to them. Tell them I love them. And I love my sisters. God bless, Armand Simone.
Williams swallowed hard. The message was so measured, so calm. A young boy snatched before he could tell his parents, thrown into a rancid, overcrowded gymnasium with dozens, perhaps hundreds of other equally confused and scared men, women and children, then shipped north to Drancy. He knew, everyone knew, that conditions there were squalid beyond belief, that after a few days in the vast, filth-ridden dormitories, of scrabbling for inedible food, trying to use the primitive, diseased sanitation, suicide became a viable option, the best way out.
But he’d thought only Parisians ended up there. Now Jews from the ZNO—the Vichy non-occupied zone—were being brought up as well. Williams could see a sprinkling of other scraps of paper beside the track, the senders clearly hoping that friendly factory workers would find them and pass them on, a desperate dead-letter drop. Even that action spoke of terrible despair. Williams made to pick one and Robert stopped him, aware that the guard on the roof was peering down at them.
‘Maybe later. There is nothing we can do. Not now.’ Williams hesitated and Robert grabbed his friend by the upper arm and squeezed as hard as he could, pulling him upright. ‘You want to join them in there? Don’t be stupid, Will. Pull yourself together.’ He said slowly: ‘We’re SNCF inspectors, Will. Remember. We don’t care. We don’t care. We mustn’t care. Not now.’
Williams checked his heartbeat. It was wild and erratic, and he slowed it, taking in big gulps of air, letting the calm of the race circuit shroud him. After a minute or so he finally nodded, fully back into character and raised a placatory hand to the German guard, who waved back.
They moved close to the last two cars, new additions which had been shunted up from a siding. Beyond a ragged line of soldiers at the rear of the train they could see white-overalled men heaving a cargo into the gaping sides of these boxcars. At first the workers looked to be hideously deformed, but Williams said: ‘Gasmasks.’
Robert nodded. Gasmasks. He pressed the trigger on the case handle and heard the faintest whirring as the reel started to spool.
‘Hey, you two. What the hell are you doing here?’ The German officer burst out of the ranks and strode towards them. ‘Who are you?’
‘SNCF,’ said Robert coolly.
Meyer snatched the ID and flicked his eyes from photo to face rapidly. ‘You have no authority over the trains of the Reich.’
‘They are not trains of the Reich. They are SNCF trains while they are on French soil.’
‘And we have authority when hazardous materials are transported.’ Williams indicated the gasmasked men.
Meyer dismissed the idea with a wave and handed the IDs back. ‘Not hazardous. The masks are just a precaution. Delousing powder.’
‘Gentlemen, gentlemen.’ The soothing voice of Georges Legine came from behind them. ‘Excuse me. Herr Meyer, is there a problem?’
‘Yes. This train has to be on its way in,’ he checked his watch, ‘twenty minutes. Exactly.’
‘It will be. Allow me to talk to these gentlemen.’ Meyer turned on his heel and went off to shout at the workers to get a move on. ‘Ah, the Germans. Such slaves to the timetable. Now, what can I do for you?’
‘We wish to check that the safety regulations as regards the transportation of toxic material are being adhered to.’
‘Of course. Come.’
He led them through the line of soldiers, who grudgingly parted. Robert was now next to the men and the cylinders they were loading and pressed the trigger once more, rotating the case to catch the label, with its prominent skull and crossbones, on film. He hoped.
‘As you can see,’ said Legine, ‘proper padding between layers and netting to hold them in place. This stuff isn’t that lethal in fresh air. Only in confined spaces. So once the clothes are treated, and the lice dead, they are laid outside and the toxin evaporates.’
They walked on to the second truck and ahead the battered old cattle cars stretched, the stench of human waste and sweat and fear oozing from them. A barrier of four soldiers standing abreast prevented them going any further along the low platform, but the expression on their faces told Williams they could smell it too. Robert nudged Williams ever so gently. He was staring at one of the Germans, his eyes boring into the man, as if he was personally responsible. Williams broke off contact.
Beyond this barrier of soldiers, four gendarmes walked the train, occasionally stopping to shout or bang their sticks on the side of the trucks. A voice occasionally reached them, a plea, asking, Robert could just make out, for water. More thumping on the sides, fresh threats from the gendarmes.
Now Williams could hear terrible coughing from within the nearest boxcar, a thin feeble sound, the sound of small lungs infected with something slowly filling them up with mucus. The youngster began to cry, a little girl, and he could hear soothing words from an adult. Still no response from anyone else, not Legine, not the guards. A gendarme was up to the chained doorway now, and he rapped on the side. ‘Quiet in there. Be quiet.’
The hacking became muffled as if a hand was over a mouth. The gendarme moved on. Robert thought of the gun in his inside pocket, constructing a dangerous fantasy of him and the policeman and a dark alley.
Legine, alarmed by the pair’s excessive interest in the trucks, steered them away. ‘Just these two trucks are our responsibility, gentlemen. Not the rest of it. Now let me assure you about safety. We’ve been making this stuff for five years. Never had an accident yet.’
The wailing started slowly, this time from a truck some distance away from them.
‘This stuff being?’ asked Williams.
Now the wail was echoing along the platform, climbing the register.
‘Zyklon B, they call it. Prussic acid. A delousing agent. Heading for the Russian front, I believe. I’ll show you the dockets.’ Legine was agitated, anxious to move away from the chilling sound. ‘They’re in my office.’
‘Shut that damned woman up.’ It was Meyer, irritated at the commotion.
Legine started to fuss, ushering them away from the train, but the screech of metal rollers as a cattle truck gate slid back made Williams stop and spin round. The cries of relief from those within as fresh air flowed into the truck were drowned by the cries of the hysterical woman, but again, the workers refused to look up and carried on loading.
Within the mass of vertical bodies, where faces crushed against faces, limbs entangled with each other, chests were pressed tight, and everyone breathed only the exhalations of their neighbour, there was a ripple as the woman forced her way to the front, her baby clasped in her arms. The gendarmes screeched at her to shut up, but she carried on wailing.
Her companions slowly prised the dead child from her arms, pinning her limbs as she thrashed about in the madness of grief, and passed it down to a gendarme, who, with surprising gentleness carried it across the platform and laid the body down in the shadow of the factory wall covering the tiny body with a paper sack.
The screams lessened then, spiralling down into sobs. The gate clanged home, the bolts were secured, but the image of those haunted faces framed in the doorway wouldn’t leave Williams. It was burned on his cortex in stark black and white, a composition of faces, hollow-eyed men and women who have already passed beyond this life and are waiting for death to save them.