‘Lucien, we have to get them upstairs,’ she said, shaking his shoulders. ‘Get up, I can’t do this alone.’
His eyes batted in terror. ‘The diamonds… prison…’
Mina twisted her hands; the more the past unravelled, the worse it grew. ‘I don’t want to know.’
‘We funded the Association by selling the diamonds her father stole.’
Mina recoiled in horror. ‘All these years and you never told me,’
‘How do you think we kept the Association going?’ Lucien gave a short laugh. ‘All blood money.’
She thought of all their work, the effort. ‘But if he stole from Jews, it’s helped Jews for years.’
Lucien shook his head. ‘And I took some to open my shop.’
Shocked, she looked around. ‘Quit living in the past. It’s over. Look, we’ve got to get them out of here. Now!’
Lucien looked at her with unseeing eyes.
Mina needed to think, but with the bodies and Lucien, and the tainted air, each breath was an effort. Somehow she had to carry the man she had killed upstairs.
Back by the soldier’s corpse, Lucien was crawling and crying on the floor.
‘Help me, Lucien,’ she said, ‘get his boots.’
‘The Wehrmacht’s coming,’ Lucien said. ‘I saw them.’
Terror clutched her. He was back in the past. Gone.
‘That’s why you have to help, Lucien, or they’ll find him… right?’
He nodded, his eyes now bright, almost crazed.
‘Good, take his boots, lift, that’s right, now through the tunnel, up the stairs.’
Somehow they managed. The soldier’s brittle hands scraped the wall like he didn’t want to go, a last effort to stay. Sickened, she forced herself to mount the steps with the burden of his mummified corpse.
At the landing, Lucien peered out. The sound of a violin came from above, the cry of a child, but no one stood in the hallway.
With one hand, he opened the door to the courtyard, and the black jackboot emerged from the garbage bag, They’d forgotten to duct tape it. She shoved it back inside.
‘Hurry, Lucien,’ she said, panting.
In the shadowed courtyard, near pots of geraniums, they stuffed the soldier’s corpse into an empty garbage container. Mina emptied the contents of another bin over it.
‘One more, Lucien,’ she whispered, ‘before the Wehrmacht come. You all right?’
He waved Mina away, shuffled ahead, leaning on his cane.
Back in the cellar, the duct-taped garbage bag sat by the crumbled mortar, bricks and gaping hole. ‘Lucien, you take this bag, I’ll cover the hole.’
For a moment, Lucien looked bewildered, then a brief flash of pain crossed his face.
‘Can you manage?’
He nodded with a glazed look
‘Put it in the same place, you understand, before the…’
‘Oui,
before the Wehrmacht,’ he interrupted. He pulled the bag and shuffled across the packed dirt floor.
Mina set the bricks back but it looked so obvious, any-one would be able to tell. And with the mortar gone, holes still remained. She didn’t know how long she kept working, trying to fit bricks in the empty spaces. What could she do? Frantic, she searched the locker. She found an old dresser on wheels, and straining, lugged it to cover the hole. For now it would do.
Footsteps and shouts sounded from the stairway.
‘Madame?’ the concierge said. ‘Madame, you must come now!’
Mina dragged the hoe, shovel and pickaxe back into the locker, shut the gate and put the padlock back on.
‘The medics…
quelle horreur!’
The concierge appeared, nervously rubbing her hands.
‘What… what’s happened?’ Mina tried to catch her breath.
Mina’s eye caught on the brown
Soldbuch
fallen in the dirt. The
Ausweisepapier
passport-sized book that doubled as identification and pay book for German soldiers. She stepped on it before the concierge could advance further.
‘Monsieur Lucien’s had an attack,’ she said.
Horrified, she tried to cover it with her foot. ‘I’m coming.’
The concierge turned and Mina bent down to grab it. A Wehrmacht ID card with the name Hans Gruber; inside, a piece of paper. She froze, then made herself move, stuffing it inside her pocket with trembling hands.
A medic leaned over Lucien, who lay sprawled on the tiles with an oxygen mask over his pale face. Another medic’s crossed hands pumped Lucien’s chest in measured thrusts.
‘Heart attack, 85 rue du Faubourg Saint Martin,’ he said, into the microphone clipped on his collar. ‘Send a second team.’
A woman with her hair in curlers stood watching on the staircase. Mina’s mind snapped back into gear. She saw the garbage bag beyond Lucien’s body.
‘Lucien did too much, I told him,’ the concierge said. ‘I said I’ll carry the garbage out. But,’ she tugged Mina’s sleeve and stared at her, ‘he said the Germans were coming. He’s gone a little funny,
non?’
Mina said nothing, her feet rooted to the floor.
‘I knew his mother, she never came back from the camp,’ the concierge said, tugging Mina’s sleeve harder, ‘but I heard things when I took over. They hid Jews down there.’
Static erupted from the medic’s microphone. ‘We’re out front, give us a status report.’
‘No response,’ said the medic.
Mina put her hand to her mouth. The medic thrust harder but Lucien’s eyes had rolled up into his head.
‘Make way,
s’il vous plaît.’’
Stretcher bearers bumped the wall in the narrow hall.
‘Too late.’ The medic shook his head. The other medic stood and picked up Lucien’s cane.
‘Lucien?’ Mina said. But he’d gone.
She choked back a sob. Her eyes settled on the garbage bag. Now it rested on her. The medic looked around. ‘His possessions, Madame?’
The concierge shook her head.
‘Non
, the poor man was taking things to the garbage. Let me take that, Monsieur.’
Mina stepped forward in alarm. Lucien’s white face gleamed in the ball light. The medic stood blocking the courtyard door.
‘Non
, I’ll do it,’ she said.
‘But Lucien said…’
Mina ignored her, grabbed the bag and, praying the concierge wouldn’t stop her, dragged it past them. She had to get the bag out of here. In the courtyard, she paused, looked around to make sure they weren’t watching, then heaved the bag. But she couldn’t lift it high enough to reach into the bin. Exhausted, she leaned against the wall. Took deep breaths until the pounding pressure in her brain stopped. Lucien… she couldn’t think about that now.
She hefted the bag again with all her strength, heard the crackling of brittle bones, and this time it landed in the bin. From inside came the squealing of rats disturbed by the noise.
Now she’d taken care of the proof. But she couldn’t rest. Back in the hallway, she made herself walk past Lucien who was being lifted onto the stretcher. Past the curious look of the concierge.
Out on the street, yellow sodium streetlights shone on bystanders. Were they watching her? She kept going, trying to ignore the catch in her heart, that racing of her blood. The doctor warned her if that happened she had to stop and rest. Stop whatever she was doing. But she couldn’t stop. Not just yet. A few more steps and she’d reach the bus stop.
Her pulse slower now, she scanned the street. Just ahead on her left the Number 47 bus approached the stop. She’d take the bus, get away. Keep the secrets. She took another step.
The bus driver never saw the old woman stumbling in the darkness into the street. His bus jolted at the thud and he heard the scream. He braked to a halt and jumped out.
‘Madame, I didn’t see you,’ he said, kneeling by the old woman. ‘
Mon Dieu
… speak.’
Mina tried to open her mouth. Little white lights danced in front of her and she saw it all so clearly now. The Feldgrau uniform and the diamonds scattered in the blood they hadn’t bothered to hide. She clutched her pocket and the little lights faded.
Passers-by paused on the pavement. Someone pointed. A
flic
, one of the passers-by, stopped and ran towards the old woman sprawled on the cobbled street. The
flic
knelt down and saw the woman’s twisted broken neck. He felt for her pulse. Nothing. Clutched in her hand was an odd brown book. On the opened page he saw faded old-fashioned German script – Hans Gruber,
Blut-Gruppe O, Feldwehel
, and a sepia photo of a young man stamped over with an eagle clutching a wreath surrounding a swastika. And creased in the fold a yellowed paper with what looked like a German poem and the words
Mina je t’aime.
PARIS CALLING by JEAN-HUGUES OPPEL
Paris is calling for help, gentlemen…’
The suits with matching ties and pocket handkerchiefs sit around three sides of the boardroom table, stony faced. The only woman present (suit-blouse-neckscarf- not matching, for ultimate chic) greets the opening remark addressed solely to the men with a resigned shrug. She’s more than used to the all-but-automatic boorishness of her peers, whatever their position in the social or political – above all political -hierarchy.
The speaker seems to notice his omission. By way of excusing himself, he grimaces vaguely in the woman’s direction before going on, his torso bending forward slightly as he rests his fists on the table below him like pillars under a viaduct.
His sharp gaze took in his audience, face by face, before he uttered his first words, a way of quickly making acquaintance to avoid the tiresome ritual of introductions. No one avoided his eye. Someone coughed slightly, breaking the graveyard silence that had prevailed until then in the boardroom of a sumptuous building in the ministerial district.
No minister is present. They are all represented by their chiefs of staff or their deputies. The woman with the offbeat scarf hails from Foreign Affairs.
The speaker has the unmistakeable air of a secret service mole. Yes, Paris is calling for help, he repeats, enunciating each syllable, adding, after a short pause for breath, that as he speaks, right here, right now, it’s no longer a question of deciding if the capital’s terrible cry is justified or not, but of understanding why we remain deaf to it still today.
The woman with the scarf discreetly admires the speaker’s subtle rhetoric, which somehow makes ‘we’ sound like ‘you’. With a jerk of the chin, the speaker indicates the file handed to each person before they entered the room, a file whose contents will perhaps help unblock a few ears in high places. This hardbound file contains: a thick pamphlet of spiral-bound A4 pages, in small print to save paper; a series of colour and black-and-white photographs, numbered in the chronological order in which they were taken; a CD-ROM containing the report and photographs in current software formats for computer nerds incapable of reading anything – words or figures – unless it’s on a screen.
The speaker reminds anyone who might not know that a study’s been requested from his serv… from the organisation he works for. The slip draws a few ironic smiles from the assembled audience. Next the speaker announces that the summary of this study can be found in the written report which details all the sociological issues. The photographs are there to illustrate certain aspects of the phenomenon, the better to capture the imaginations of superiors whose minds are sometimes on other things; with a decent budget, they might have had animated images and stereo sound too.
In several shots, a casual observer might nonetheless note at first glance that a burning car in the night is a beautiful thing.
There were hundreds of them in the streets and in residential car parks in the autumn of last year, and in all four corners of the country. The fire had started at the gateways to the capital, following the umpteenth tragic news report of suburban youths pitted against police officers. The fire in the city had lasted a month.
A month of riots.
Riots that were predictable. The speaker would go even further, weighing his words: they were so predictable they should never have happened at all.
* * * *
‘Business good, Momo?’
‘Well yeah, I s’pose, sir, but shit, it’s been better! Hash doesn’t pay like it used to, and I’m not even talking about the stuff that falls off the back of a van, hi-fis and TVs… Prices are rock bottom! Lucky there’s still mobiles to make a bit of profit on, otherwise business would be a total disaster!’
‘So it’s lucky I turn up from time to time, huh?’
‘Don’t I know it, sir. You pay well but times are hard and I’m the family breadwinner, so you’ve got to understand I’m putting up prices for information…’
‘You’re on the ball, aren’t you! Life’s tough, especially for the poor, or didn’t you know? People have got no money now, Momo, so they’re going back to basics; first things first and the small stuff goes out the window, see?’
‘I don’t see anything when you start talking like the class brainbox!’
‘Because you went to school, I suppose? It’s true you can count…’
‘Of course!’
‘People are skint so they haven’t got the money to buy your junk any more. D’you get it now, Momo?’
‘Yes sir, I get it. But it stinks, if you ask me, because if that’s true and it goes on like this any longer, things’ll stay in the shit and we’ll have to find ways out of it so we can put food on the table, see?
‘If not, I’m telling you, all hell’s going to break loose on the estates.
‘The shit’s really going to hit the fan, sir.’
* * * *
The Prime Minister’s chief of staff is disconcerted by the speaker’s last assertion, delivered as if it were gospel truth: was he accusing the government of incompetence? Or worse, laxity? The Minister of the Interior’s right-hand man immediately weighs in, fearing a dirty trick by opponents hidden even among those loyal to the majority party.