‘Ah, Monsieur Lucien, long time no see,’ said a young woman with a baby on her hip standing at the concierge’s door. ‘Maman’s shopping,
desolé.’
Startled, he stepped back then recovered.
‘Ça va,
Delphine,’ he said, greeting her with kisses on both cheeks. ‘Just getting things from storage. Don’t worry, I remember the way, we’ll see ourselves out.’
‘Careful on the stairs, one of the lights went out,’ she said, nodding to Mina. ‘They’re steep.’
She meant for old people like you. Mina thought.
‘Merci’
He led the way past the wirecage elevator. In the back. Mina saw the rear cobbled courtyard with green garbage containers by planter boxes of delphiniums and pots of geraniums.
Lucien opened the cellar door, leaned on his cane, took one step down.
Mina stopped. ‘But this is ridiculous! My back’s gone. I won’t go down there again. I can’t.’
‘You came this far, Mina! Don’t make it so difficult.’
Lucien clutched his cane, staring at her.
‘This feels wrong,’ Mina said.
‘It’s simple,’ said Lucien. ‘It was always the plan. We made a pact.’ He switched on the cellar light.
‘A pact… what do you mean?’ asked Mina.
Lucien ignored her. ‘Ready?’
She stood, not budging. ‘What pact?’
He leaned forward, lowered his voice. ‘Years ago our group made a pact never to reveal what a happened. Or to let anyone find the body.’
’But everyone’s gone except us.’
‘That’s why I must keep my word.’
She’d never heard about this pact… what did it mean? Dread filled her but before she could ask more he’d gone ahead. She clutched the railing as Lucien proceeded down the narrow stone stairs. Dampness and the smell of mildew and rotting wood assailed her nostrils. And it took her back to that time so long ago but still vivid today.
Sixteen years old, her hands browned with shoe polish and sore from stitching leather uppers on wooden-sole shoes – doing the piece work her parents took in to survive and put food on the table. She walked in public always anxious an official would demand her papers and discover she’d folded her jacket lapel over her yellow star.
Lucien shone the flashlight over the arched stone walls branching into tunnels under the building. Flaking stucco powdered the beaten earth floor. Electrical wires and tools were set to the side. Lining the walls were caged storage areas for each apartment, holding plastic bins, children’s bikes, chairs behind the wooden enclosures.
‘It didn’t look like this before,’ Lucien said in alarm. ‘That’s all new.’
‘When did you last come here?’ Mina asked.
‘Years ago,’ he said. ‘It’s Maman’s old storage. I rent it. They never ask questions.’ Lucien shuffled ahead. A bare electric bulb cast stark light over their faces.
‘Number 38, that’s it.’ Lucien reached under the enclosure, rooted in the dirt, pulled out a key and unlocked the padlock. He opened the door of a warped wooden shed to a musty smell.
Mina saw the cobwebbed foot-pedal sewing machine in the corner. ‘You kept that, Lucien… here?’
His father had been a skilled tailor. ‘Eh. I had no room in my place. When I came back from the camp, that’s all that was left.’ He shrugged but Mina caught the wistful look on his face. Lucien’s family had been deported and he was the only one who returned.
Lucien pushed aside boxes and shone the flashlight on the bricked-up stone wall.
‘I remembered wrong.’ Lucien shook his head. ‘See, the bricked-up part goes further all along the wall. Which part was it?’
The absurdity of the venture struck Mina.
‘Zut alors!
If we can’t find it, how can any one else? Let’s go.’
He’d gone to the side of the locker, shone the beam and stepped back.
‘Mon Dieu!.
The toes of faded black leather boots stuck through a hole in the crumbling mortared brick. The blood drained from Mina’s face. She turned to run and his cane landed across her arm.
‘No you don’t,’ he said. ‘It’s too late.’ Lucien blinked in fear. ‘They’ll find him. I didn’t live all these years to be arrested for murder,’ he said, his voice now edged with steel. ‘I promised the others.’
‘You’re crazy!’
‘So Mina, you’ll let her get away with lies… again?’
‘But what can we do?’
‘We can manage part of it,’ said Lucien. ‘Call your grandson, tell him there’s old furniture and we need his help. Get him to bring his butcher’s van. But first…’
He took a pick, then handed Mina a garden hoe from the locker.
‘You expect me to use this?’ Mina asked.
Lucien spread sheets of plastic from the locker over the dirt. ‘There’s no way to cover this up, we’ve got to get him out.’
He was right.
While they worked, a slow process, footsteps rumbled from the floor above. Lucien switched on an old transistor radio, the static and bad reception drowning out the noise of the chipping and scraping. The wartime-grade mortar chipped away and crumbled. Mina knelt on the ground removing the bricks, piling them one by one. After half an hour, scraps of the wool Feldgrau soldier’s uniform showed.
Mina wiped the sweat from her brow and sniffed. A dry must-filled odour and sixty-year-old air emanated from the wall. The air of decay. Her mind went back to that night, this cavern lit by sputtering candles; they’d arranged for their Hebrew teacher to escape on a waiting canal barge and Mina had been early, the first of the group to arrive.
But instead of Lucien and their teacher, she’d found the blond, well-fed Wehrmacht soldier, the perfect Aryan. The young, handsome soldier from the warehouse next door who’d turned a blind eye to her yellow star and given her food. Not once but several times. She’d never told the others or her parents where the food came from. Or about the warm touch of his hands when he held hers. Now the soldier held a bottle in his hand, beer fumes emanated from his breath. ‘I waited for you, thought you like this,’ he said. ‘Now why does Hansi think that?’ He squinted his eyes as if in thought. ‘Hansi thinks you’re nice. A nice girl.’ He slurred his words in broken French. Drunk, he was drunk.
‘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.
Lucien, immobile on the floor, clutched his knees, mumbling.