Stranger at the Gates (15 page)

‘All right,' Savage said coldly. ‘So I'm not Swiss. You've found out. But I'm here and I've been made pretty bloody welcome. So what do you tell your German friends?'

‘I tell them,' jean said grimly, ‘that I became suspicious. That I confronted you, you admitted you were using false papers; you tried to escape and I shot you.'

‘Very tidy,' Savage said. ‘But where does that leave your wife? You think she won't be questioned? You'd better shoot us both. Unless you're ready to give her up too.'

‘No!' Louise cried out. ‘Jean—for God's sake …'

‘He won't shoot,' Savage said. ‘Right now he'd like to, but he knows he can't. He knows you won't alibi him if he does, and he doesn't fancy the boys getting their itchy hands on you. Why don't you put the gun away? There's nothing you can do about me that doesn't give Louise to the Gestapo!' He turned away from them both and dropped into a chair.

‘You bastard,' Jean de Bernard said. ‘You blackmailing bastard …' He turned to Louise. ‘You see now what you've done! You see what these people really are!'

‘He's a soldier,' she said slowly. ‘He's here to do something important. He can't let anything stand in the way. I don't blame him.'

‘No good trying to enlist her,' Savage said. ‘She's on my side. I tell you something, Comte de Bernard. She's got more guts in her finger than you and forty million bloody Frenchmen like you.'

‘You're getting out of here,' Jean said. ‘I don't care where you go, but you're leaving here!'

Savage waited; his instinct counselled him to wait, to leave the initiative to the woman. She had been taken by surprise, but he noted with admiration how bravely she had reacted. He looked at her and smiled slightly. Her scent was still on his hands, a faint suggestion of flowery powder and cologne. He would have liked to take that gun away and bring it butt downwards onto the Comte's skull.

‘Jean,' Louise said slowly, ‘he can't leave here. He's got to stay in this district. If you turn him out, I'll go with him. Then you'll be sure of one thing. We'll be arrested together.'

‘I see,' de Bernard said. ‘I see how it is. He's seduced you completely. You're putting the children at risk, you realise that? And my father? You're quite prepared to do this, just for him.'

‘Not for him, no,' Louise said quietly. ‘What you saw shouldn't have happened. I'm sorry it did. It was just as much my fault as his. I'm going to help him because I want to see the Allies win. I want to see your country free of Germans. It's too late for me to turn back. And now it's too late for you too. You'll have to help whether you like it or not.'

‘That's sense,' Savage remarked. ‘You believe in neutrality, that's okay by us. Just forget you came up here.'

‘My wife's in danger,' Jean blazed at him. ‘My whole family's in danger because of you!'

‘It so happens,' Savage said quietly, ‘that they're in greater danger than you think. Why the hell don't you put that popgun away and listen?'

Slowly the gun lowered. ‘What do you mean?' Jean said. ‘What danger?' Savage took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit two. He held one out to Louise. Her hands were quite steady.

‘I came here to do a job,' he said. ‘I was picked for it and trained for it. And I tell you this. Nothing on God's earth is going to stop me. Get that clear first. I could make a deal with you now but I've no guarantee you'd stick to it. All right, you'll protect your wife even if it means helping me. But for how long? You'd think of some way to cross me up and get yourselves in the clear. I can't take that chance. I can't take any chance that could stop this going through. So I've got to trust you. You think you can live with the Nazis and survive, don't you? You think if you keep your nose clean and don't get into trouble they'll let you alone and you can go on living here, bringing up your family?'

‘I know I can,' Jean de Bernard interrupted furiously. ‘It's people like you—you talk about being trained—trained to kill! To destroy, to come into my country and throw away French lives because of some scheme thought up in London! You may be expendable, maybe you don't mind being killed, but my wife and family aren't going to suffer because of your mission or whatever it is. You say they're in danger—I don't believe you. You're the danger.'

The gun was raised again, pointing to Savage.

‘You can shoot me,' he said coldly. ‘Go ahead. But first I'm going to tell you why I'm here. Then you can make your choice.'

Adolph Vierken had taken a suite at the Crillon. When he came to Paris six months earlier he had been very tired, unable to sleep, suffering from the combat fatigue which was common among men who had served on the Eastern front. His service in Russia had been almost eighteen months. He had come back two stone lighter, suffering from dysentery and exhaustion. He and his men had fought a savage rearguard action against the advancing Russian armies, and performed their function of punitive expeditions against the civilian population with a brutality which had earned Vierken the Iron Cross with oak leaves. He could account for thirty thousand executions and the destruction of a hundred villages with every human inhabitant slaughtered, by mass machine gunning, gassing in mobile vans and public hangings. He was weary and melancholic when he arrived in France after a home leave which hadn't helped his nerves at all. His family were strangers, his wife and children irritated him, the least noise caused an explosion of tension; he had even threatened them with violence. He had applied for and received a non-combatant posting; the plum assignment in France was his reward for duty unremittingly performed. Music was his favourite relaxation. In the first few weeks he went alone to the Paris Opera House or to the Conservatoire and listened to concerts; slowly he relaxed. He began to sleep again, his appetite returned. He brought a ruthless efficiency to his police work which reorganised the S.D. section and he began to enjoy life. Since his return from the East he hadn't touched a woman. He felt drained, impotent; his manhood was suspended, and the knowledge made him savage. His interrogations were ferocious even by Gestapo standards. He fled the cellars of the avenue Foch and soothed himself with Mozart, Brahms, and Beethoven, with a luxurious suite in the splendid French hotel, with superb food and wines. But it was when he met Régine de Bernard that his cure was complete. She was sitting next to him at a concert and for the first half hour he hadn't noticed her. A concert of Schumann's romantic
lieder
held him rapt, unaware of anything or anyone, until the interval. When he noticed her first the impression was unfavourable. He had always liked tall women with big breasts and Aryan colouring. Stupid, subservient women, like the wife whose docility had almost driven him mad when he came home. This was a girl, slight and dark and not even pretty. He didn't know what made him speak to her. Perhaps it was the nostalgic effect of Schumann's beautiful love songs. He had felt a surge of loneliness. He opened the programme and asked her which of the cycle she liked best.

When the concert ended he took her to supper. They talked, politely and casually about unimportant things. He found her intelligent, intense in a disturbing way. He noticed her small hands and the neatness of her body. Interest began to stir in him. He saw her home, very correct, holding his excitement in check. The next day he sent his car to the Sorbonne and took her out to lunch. By the end of that week she came back to the Crillon with him and they went to bed. She was a virgin; uncertain, eager, clumsy. Desire for her and satisfaction, followed a wild unleashing of the pent-up force of imprisoned sexuality. He found his manhood with Regine; she found with him a self she never knew existed.

Cruelty, force, possession; she wanted love in the terms which most appealed to him. Her intellectual cleverness made her submission all the more exciting. She kissed his hands and worshipped him for being what he was; there was no shame, no inhibition. They were twins in their desires, and out of their sexual sympathy a curious love grew up between them. He had never been loved like that by a woman before. He discovered tenderness, outside of making love; it pleased him to be nice to her, to play records together in his sitting room, to buy her beautiful clothes which she could only wear for him. They liked poetry; she taught him to appreciate the plays of Racine and Molière, she went to museums and art galleries with him. Sometimes they wandered along the banks of the Seine, he in civilian clothes, holding hands and looking at the timeless beauty of the city at night. But most of all they made love. The night she left St. Blaize they were together in his bedroom, exhausted and complete. She had gone to his hotel as soon as she reached Paris. She had taken a bicycle to the station and sat miserably waiting for a train, rubbing her cheek where Jean had slapped her, crying with anger and jealousy. She had disliked her sister-in-law from the moment she came to the house. Her own mother she hardly knew; the memory of a delicate woman, dying upstairs in a room full of flowers, was already dim. Her father's grief and withdrawal had been more of an agony to her than the loss of her mother. The arrival of Jean's wife caused a furious upheaval of adolescent jealousy and the fear of being superseded. Dislike had become hatred, but it was silent, secretive, feeding on imagined wrongs. Nothing Louise had done could expunge the crime of coming into the family and taking the place which Régine believed would have been hers.

She leaned on an elbow and stroked Vierken's chest, playing with the coarse dark hair. And she told him what had happened.

‘He hit me,' she said. ‘He slapped my face. The first time in my life he's ever touched me. Even when I was a child he never did that. Just because I told him the truth about her.'

‘You're jealous, sweetheart,' Vierken told her. ‘You shouldn't feel like that about a brother. You have me now. I want all your jealousy.'

‘How can he defend her?' Régine said. ‘I thought he had more pride. She hasn't slept with him for years! I know that man isn't her cousin, I know it!'

‘How?' he asked her. ‘How can you know?'

‘Because of the way he looks at her,' she said. ‘It's like the way you look at me. I know what that means … Jean had never met him before, he just arrived, no warning, nothing. There's something wrong about him; I felt it as soon as I saw him!'

‘And if he is her lover,' Vierken said, ‘what does it matter to you? If your brother were a man he'd know how to deal with them. Why make yourself unhappy? Look at you, your eyes are full of tears …'

‘Swiss,' she went on obsessively. ‘A Swiss lawyer—he didn't look like a lawyer to me!'

Vierken rolled over on his back, his arm around her. He pulled the pillow straight under his head. ‘What did he look like then?'

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘But they were lying, both of them. I'll never forgive Jean for taking her part against me. Never!'

‘Hush,' Vierken said. ‘Forget about it. I love your little breasts. Come here …' Early in the morning he sent her to the Sorbonne in his car. He bathed and shaved, whistling to himself. He had an appointment with the Military Governor at ten o'clock. His dislike for General Stulpnagel made these meetings difficult. He resented the arrogance of the military, their ill-concealed snobbery towards his troops and his officers. A middle-class German from a small town near Cologne, he hated the Prussians and the class they represented. He and his élite had taken the place of the Junkers in the German hierarchy. They meant to keep it. He went to the writing table in the sitting room and made a few notes. Then he put a call through to his office and was connected to his aide.

‘This is a Obergruppenführer Vierken. I want a security check run on a Swiss national. Yes. Number one priority. The name is Roger Savage, living in Berne, works for a firm of Swiss lawyers, Felon et Brassier. Find out if he's visiting France. If he isn't, send a message to the S.D. at Chartres to arrest a man staying at the Château St. Blaize under that name. Good. I'll be in at midday.'

He rang off, crumpled the piece of paper on which he had written the details Régine had told him, and threw it away. Her family quarrels didn't interest him; an affair between her sister-in-law and a cousin was no business of his. But a stranger with a suspicious background story suddenly arriving near to General Brühl's headquarters was very much the concern of the S.S.

‘I don't believe it,' Jean de Bernard said. ‘It's impossible.'

‘You don't want to believe it,' Savage said. ‘Because if you do you'll have to get off the fence.' Louise said nothing; she looked at them both, Jean stunned and disbelieving, the American contemptuous and bitter. It was incredible. Now that Savage had told them she wanted to reject it. It was too horrible to be true. Not even the Nazis …

‘You could be lying,' Jean de Bernard said slowly. ‘You could be inventing the whole story, just to keep me quiet, to make me help you …'

‘I could but I'm not. Use your head; nobody makes up something like this. We've known they were working on it. They made the break-through last year; Brühl found a formula. Using concentration camp prisoners for experiments.'

‘Oh my God,' Louise broke in. There was something terrible in Savage's face now. Even Jean saw it and was silent.

‘Auschwitz,' Savage said. ‘He was in charge of the I. G. Farben complex there. He started this project and tested it on men, women and children. My wife was one of them. And my child. She was four years old.'

Jean de Bernard opened the revolver; slowly he took out the bullets one by one. He dropped the gun and the ammunition into his pocket.

‘I volunteered,' Savage said. ‘I'm going to get that bastard. I'm going to kill him.' He opened and closed his hands. ‘But that's nothing to do with you. It's not your problem what happened to my family.'