Stranger at the Gates (7 page)

He lived on the floor above in a room whose windows had been lengthened to give him a view over the countryside, with a gramophone and a collection of books. He was a beautiful old man, gentle and confused, who played the same record over and over again, beating time to the music, his head a little to one side. His wife had died just before Louise came to St. Blaize and something had gone with her, some spark of life without which he began to wither mentally. His dependence upon his son was like that of a child, loving but intrinsically selfish. He clung to Louise because she was there, but there was no gauge of his real feelings. Food and comfort and security were all he needed. She gave them to him and he seemed grateful. Whenever she came into his room he looked up and gave his charming smile, holding his hand out to her. It was doubtful if he understood what had happened, whether he appreciated the significance of Heinz Minden coming to sit with him, being respectful and polite in order to win friendship in the house. He was a ghost who hadn't died. The night the Palliers were executed and their murderer sat in the dining room below with Jean, Louise had taken refuge in the old man's room, listening to a record of Caruso singing Pagliacci, which the old man played again and again, while she wound up the gramophone. She had cried that night but he hadn't noticed or if he did he made no comment. Like all old people he ignored the grief of others for fear it would disturb his own placidity. There had been a Requiem Mass offered for the Palliers in the village church, a brave gesture by the priest, Father Duval, which Louise had never forgotten, even though she seldom went to Mass.

Jean and his sister Régine had not attended. Louise had knelt alone in the de Bernard stall, with pathetically few people in the body of the little church, and the widow weeping only a few feet away from her. There had been no sermon: not even Father Duval dared preach against the murder of his parishioners. The Requiem Mass itself was a risk, but the influence of Jean and the effect of his conciliatory invitation appeased the military commander and there were no consequences for the priest or the few worshippers. As the wife of a prominent collaborationist, Louise was permitted to strike her attitude and escape investigation. As a woman she wasn't regarded as important in a world so essentially dominated by men. After the executions the village had quickly returned to normal. The troops drove away, business was resumed, the children went back to school and the rumours died.

But Louise and everyone else had heard them. It was said that the body of the elder Pallier was so badly beaten as to be unrecognisable when it was collected for burial. The fate of the British agent could only be imagined. He had been last seen driving away in a car with four Gestapo agents, his wrists handcuffed behind him and a look of despair on his face.

It could happen again. Louise pulled the covers close and tried to sleep. She found herself praying that it was only a reconnaissance plane, and that no second victim had come floating down to torture and death at St. Blaize en Yvelines.

In the village itself all the lights were out. It was a country community and they kept early hours. Only the cats and a single scavenging dog roamed the streets. In the back room of Madame Pallier's bakery, a man sat eating a meal by candlelight. The curtains were drawn and a rug had been pinned over the window to keep any fraction of light from showing through. The heavy-set figure of a woman, dressed in black, was seated in a wooden chair close to the door.

‘You have no right to come here,' she whispered. There was a gun on the table, near the man's right hand. He looked at her.

‘They killed your husband and your son. You ought to want to help.'

‘I never wanted them to get involved,' she hissed at him; her face was grey and her eyes sharp with fear and anger. ‘I told them it was madness. I told them you dirty British were just making use of them and nobody would care what happened to them if anything went wrong! But they wouldn't listen—no, they were full of politics and all that wind—and look what happened. Dead, both of them, and me left alone with nobody to help me, running this shop, working just to keep alive in my old age. You get out of here! Go somewhere else!'

‘And have you call the Germans?' the man said. ‘Like hell! You make a move or a sound and I'll shoot you, understand that? I'm no English gentleman, Madame. I wouldn't hesitate.'

‘They'll get you,' she sneered. ‘They'll cut your balls off when they find you. That's what they did to the other one, the man who came here. They tore him to pieces making him tell … I'm not afraid of you! And I won't help you!'

‘You are helping me,' he said. ‘And you'll go on doing it, just for tonight. I'll be gone by tomorrow. You be a nice old lady now, and nothing will happen to you.'

‘And when you're caught,' she demanded, ‘and they make you tell where you were hiding? What becomes of me then, eh?'

‘You get shot,' the man said. ‘But if you try anything while I'm here, I'll do it first. So you've got trouble either way. You make good bread. I'm hungry.'

‘You're eating my rations,' Madame Pallier accused. ‘You come in here and steal my food …' She called him an obscene name. He went on eating, watching her. He was in the early thirties, a fair-haired man, with irregular features and blue eyes. He had a small suitcase and a smart leather attaché case with initials in gold. R.B.S. He wore a French roll-necked oatmeal sweater and casual trousers. His shoes were two-tone calf and suède, made pre-war. He looked a well-off member of the professional class who was in the country for the weekend.

At that moment his mind was occupied by the problem of Madame Pallier. London had supplied his chiefs with her name and address in St. Blaize. There was no Resistance in the district, no Communist activity because it was miles from major industrial development.

There was a chance of assistance from the widow of a Frenchman shot for hiding a British agent two years earlier. He could either try her or hole up in the woods at Chemire till the hunt had died down. He had elected to trust the widow. The London-based branch of the American Office of Strategic Services had provided him with the vital contact, upon whom the whole plan would depend.

Fortunately it wasn't Madame Pallier. He poured out some wine; he had to decide what to do with her. The solution was obvious, but being a reasonable man, he tried not to jump to it too quickly. He didn't want to kill her till he was certain that he had to. She had a hard, shrewd face; everything about the way she sat, the tightness of her clenched hands, suggested a desire to rush into the street and scream for help. The moment he left the house in the morning, she would find a telephone and get through to the local army headquarters. He couldn't trust her even if she promised. Her own skin was at risk. Her husband and son she regarded as fools who had thrown their lives away and her remembrance of them was a grudge. He couldn't take the chance.

There was a mental adjustment to be made before you killed a woman. He had been taught this. They had to be depersonalised; you had to get them out of focus, so that it was just a shape, an object. It made it much easier. ‘I'm sorry about the rations,' he said.

She didn't answer; she hugged herself and glared at him.

‘You'd like me to go now, wouldn't you?'

‘Yes!' She spat it at him, coming forward in the chair.

‘If I did, how do I know you won't raise an alarm? Would you give me your promise?'

She didn't hesitate. ‘Yes, yes, of course I would. I wouldn't tell anyone, I don't want trouble, that's all. You go. I won't say anything.'

There wasn't a hope in hell of trusting her. He had an assignment on which a quarter of a million lives depended. One old woman—he stood up from the table and picked up his gun. ‘Okay then,' he said. She was becoming a dark shape in front of him, the embittered face was a blur. ‘You open the door first and make sure it's clear.' She turned her back on him and he fired.

Heinz Minden had not gone to bed. He liked to work late; he found it difficult to lay everything aside and leave something until the morning. Unanswered questions spoiled his sleep. He was methodical by nature and this trait had been developed by his training into an obsession. He had been on General Brühl's staff at the Château Diane for six months, and it was certainly the most satisfying part of his career. He leaned back in his chair and stretched; his shoulders were stiff from stooping; he shuffled his papers together into a neat pile, fastened them with a clip, stacked them in his briefcase and closed it. It was self-locking. He wore the key round his neck with his identity disc. He had enjoyed the evening. For eighteen months he had been stationed near enough to Breslau to spend weekends at home. The move to France had distressed him; he hated leaving his family. He disliked a mess atmosphere; like his chief. General Brühl, he was not a professional soldier, and his attitude to the rigidity of military life was tolerant but not enthusiastic. He liked privacy and the company of women in the evenings. He missed his own two children badly. He wrote to them both twice a week Photographs of them all stood in a frame beside his bed. He judged that within another six months, he would be back with them again. 1943 had been a bad year; he remembered the sense of despair that grew in him as the Russian campaign disintegrated and the rumours of collapse crept through the corridors of the informed. Food was short, casualties mountainous, air raids transformed the nights into a hell of modern making. Germans like himself began to tremble. But now he was confident. Now he knew that victory was certain for his people. He carried this knowledge with him and it made him invulnerable. Land, sea, air, blockade, invasion. It would still end with Germany as master of the world. He didn't see this in terms of a Wagnerian triumph, a funeral pyre of subject races presided over by the men gods of the Reich.

To him it was a state of order, a peace and continuity which would envelop Europe and in which the German virtues would be generally adopted. It was a return to his home, a rebuilding of the cities, a life in which the children grew up without fear. And it would come. He knew this now. He thought of Frederick Brühl. He was the son of a Hamburg butcher; Minden's own father had been a solicitor's clerk. They had many traits in common. They were in their thirties; Brühl looked older. He too was quiet, and although a bachelor, untouched by the fashionable smear of homosexuality. He painted for relaxation, and in Minden's opinion showed some talent. He didn't swagger and he didn't shout. He surrounded himself with his own people and, blessed by the personal protection of Heinrich Himmler with whom he was on friendly terms, he carried out his work. He had a weakness, which the upper-class officers derided, but which Minden thought amusing and quite harmless. He was a romantic snob. Grandeur appealed to him, and he surrounded himself with the trappings of greatness which belonged to a vanished age. For this reason he had made his headquarters in the Château Diane, the magnificent house built for the most famous royal courtesan of the sixteenth century, Diane de Poitiers, mistress of Henri II. In many ways it was extremely suitable; it was built in semi-fortress style, with a superb gateway, surmounted by Diane herself in stone, flanked by stags. The General occupied the royal apartments; he took his meals with his officers in the state dining room, at a refectory table twenty feet long, with Renaissance candelabra and superb tapestries; he had insisted on having the original four-poster bed fitted with a proper mattress so that he might sleep in it. There was a large contemporary portrait of Diane de Poitiers which had been moved from the marble hall into the General's sitting room.

It showed her in the guise of Diana the huntress, naked and voluptuous, the crescent moon, symbol of the goddess, gleaming in her hair. The General liked to sit and stare at it, entranced. It was not a picture that aroused any sensual response in Heinz Minden. Nude voluptuaries were not his type.

Whereas the slim and elegant Comtesse de Bernard would have driven him to any folly. When he first came to the Château St. Blaize, she had avoided him, making no secret of her hostility. Being a man of sensitivity he appreciated her resentment and made himself as unobtrusive as possible. He thought the Comtesse the most sexually attractive woman he had met in his life. When she walked into a room or stood near him, he broke out into a fine sweat; his hands, normally so sure and steady, trembled. He lay awake at night, forgetting his pretty wife with whom he had been so happy and dreamed hot, lustful dreams of possessing the Comtesse in unlikely erotic situations. He was a patient man and doggedly determined. He wanted her and as the weeks went by and she was forced by circumstances into accepting him, he felt that one day his desire would be realised.

He set out to be a benefactor; he made friends with the two children, whom he genuinely liked, and was flattered by their response. He even went up and talked to the old Comte; he brought presents for Jean de Bernard, choosing those luxuries which he knew were unobtainable on the open market. Cognac, champagne, cigars. He ordered his batman to help the two servants, he made himself part of the family in spite of themselves and little by little he was taken for granted. When he first arrived, Louise de Bernard used to leave the salon rather than sit in his presence. Now she talked to him over the dinner table, and it wasn't long before he sensed the deep hostility which she felt towards her husband. Minden was not a particularly immoral or ruthless man. He had his own code, which was ethical and middle class. He wouldn't have deliberately put himself between husband and wife. But this wife, whom he wanted to the point of agony, didn't even share a room with her husband. The batman had soon discovered that. The knowledge diminished the stature of the Comte de Bernard in his eyes. No self-respecting man would have allowed his wife to lock him out. Minden, normally mild and considerate, with an exaggerated view of women's frailty, would have soon put an end to the attempt. The situation increased his hope of ultimate success. She must be lonely; she was young and beautiful and living like a nun. He brought her a present of scent at Christmas, and began very carefully to disclose his interest in her. He had to be careful, because she was spirited, and a premature move would spoil his chances.