The House with Blue Shutters (36 page)

The fat man seemed quite kind, he spoke French. He said he understood Karl was the baby’s father? She nodded. He reached out
and stroked Jacky’s cheek with his fat paw, it was all Oriane could do not to jerk the child away. He could see she was a
good girl, the fat man was saying, that she wouldn’t be the sort to want trouble. Did she know that her brother was a
maquisard
, one of Nadl’s men?

This man was a liar, Oriane thought. He was trying to trick her, but he was clever. She shouldn’t pretend not to know what
he meant, he might get angry.

‘I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t see how that’s possible. William is, well, he’s a bit backward. He wouldn’t understand.’

‘Nevertheless, we have evidence.’

Did that mean he knew about the other guns, the stolen guns Oriane had kept for Laurent? Jacky had fallen asleep, his breath
quick and soft against her breast, she had to be careful, so careful.

‘Sternbach was trying to help you. You know that’s a crime?’ She nodded again. ‘Now you can help him. Where is your brother?’

‘I don’t know, sir. Truly I don’t.’

The fat man poked his head into the passage and another man came in. Oriane recognized Karl’s friend Willi. Willi grabbed
her suddenly and held her arms behind her back, she couldn’t struggle in case Jacky tipped out. The fat man reached into her
shawl, his hand suddenly deft and quick as a heron’s beak stabbing at a pond, and pulled Jacky free. The baby began to cry,
squirming and struggling, Oriane was terrified he would fall on to the stone floor. The fat man swung him back and forth like
a pendulum, his legs in their tiny red woollen trousers pumping frantically at the air. Jacky was screaming, and the fat man
handed him to Willi, who carried him away, closing the door. His wails grew fainter.

‘Where is your brother?’

When she couldn’t hear him crying she would have no more time left to decide. There was no great moment of choice. William
died as she opened her mouth. What woke
her screaming for the rest of her life was not what happened later, as Ginette came to believe, but her uncertainty afterwards
that as she looked into the fat man’s expectant face it was not Karl she meant to save, that she wanted to see his eyes on
her one last time, with hunger in them.

René had read very few books in his life, but when they went on their yearly holiday to his wife’s family at Narbonne he enjoyed
reading the detective magazines. Whenever the villains temporarily got the better of the detective, they would knock him unconscious
with an ornate lamp or a sudden blow to the head. Unconsciousness did not seem to be so easily obtained in real life. He waited
for it between the blows, for the black mist that would surely descend on him, but it didn’t come. Instead he felt himself
shrinking, shrivelling up into a concentrated ball of pain. His wife was in the church with the children. The men were in
the
Mairie
. Only he and Père Guillaume knew what had happened at Oradour. Something had happened at Monguèriac. He tried to guess what
it might be, the detective would know, he would produce a train timetable from his well-cut suit and prove that the villain
could not have been on the 6.45 to Paris. His wife was in the church. They would be going in trains to Normandy where the
fighting was, Laurent Nadl had hidden a gun in the barn.
‘Yes,’ he shouted, though it seemed to make no noise. ‘Please, yes. I’ve remembered.’ They were laughing and they gave him
a glass of water. That was how it was, they would be kind now, they were allowing him to lie on the ground, so cool under
his face.

The rat wandered about sniffing at the boxes, twitching its whiskers. ‘Shhh,’ whispered William. The rat’s feet were loud.
It turned and squeaked so he could see its long yellow rat teeth. ‘Shh!’ he said more strongly, kicking at it with his boot.
The rat ran away. William was pleased. The black man had said to be very very quiet. He stroked about the damp ground on either
side of him until his fingers remembered that the violin was gone. Papie might be looking after it. He was a bit hungry but
it wasn’t time to eat so he lay on the ground and slept, playing a little tune on the fret with his fingers until they twitched
into stillness. After a while he was even more hungry and he wished the rat would come back to keep him company, so he sang
a little rat song, chirruping and slurping his lips like the skin of a boiled potato. Then cold grey light came through the
open door. Oriane was there with the little baby and some more black men. William crowed with joy and ran towards her. Finally
she had come to fetch him home.

By ten o’clock in the morning there was a terrible stench in the church. Nearly all the children had soiled themselves and
the women had resorted to using the flower vases. They put them in the confessional for privacy and removed them when they
were full. Madame Larivière had broken down and was sobbing intermittently, recounting the story of the mayor’s
arrest over and over. Those who had been at the dance joined in, saying the same things again and again as they tried to hush
the hungry children, trying to find a connection, an explanation. Charlotte Boissière had done her best. She had sent Betty
Dubois to the vestry for the communion wine and the wafers, which they shared out amongst the little ones. There was holy
water in the stoups. Some of the older women protested, but Charlotte said firmly that God would want them to keep their strength
up and anyway it wasn’t Mass so it wasn’t as though they were eating Him personally. She was uncertain about the theology
of that, but it was better they have something to squabble about amongst themselves. She and Magalie Contier had made a precarious
ziggurat of pews from which they took turns to look out of the window into the square, though the hours dragged on and nothing
happened except the bored sentries changed places with their doubles. There were two windows on either side of the door of
the
Mairie
, and Charlotte could discern the bodies of the men inside, changing places every few minutes to allow others to look out.

Several cars drew up in the square. The driver of the first climbed down and held the door open for an immensely fat man,
who went straight to the café bench in the shade of the chestnut tree. Charlotte could see the sweat oozing from his forehead,
which he dabbed with a white handkerchief. Two more soldiers descended and spoke to the sentries outside the
Mairie
.

‘What’s happening?’

‘What can you see?’

‘They’re bringing the men out,’ answered Charlotte,
clutching the window ledge for support as her knees began to jerk like a marionette’s.

‘Can you see Yves?’

‘Can you see Bernard?’

Charlotte flapped her hand behind her for quiet. The men were prodded into rows in the middle of the square, a gun trained
at each corner of their ranks. From the second car the men helped what was obviously a prisoner, the white blindfold of his
face vanishing into the silver-gold of his hair. ‘Please,’ Charlotte whispered to herself, ‘please, please,’ though she could
not have said what it was she was pleading for.

The prisoner was positioned with his face to the wall of the
Mairie
. Charlotte turned her head to the fat man’s face and closed her eyes as she saw him nod, heard the instruction and then staggered
and almost fell at the sound of the gunfire. Behind her the church was silent except for the panting of the women’s breath.
Charlotte allowed herself to look at the black heap against the dripping red wall.

‘It was one of them,’ she managed to say, she felt faint and wanted to step down, but her fingers seemed frozen to the window
ledge, the whole weight of her body supported by the contact.

William Aucordier was brought from the third car. Charlotte thought how the noise must have hurt his poor sensitive ears.
He was supported on either side by soldiers, and one of them reached on to the seat of the car and brought out William’s violin.
The fat man was smiling, and Charlotte understood what evil he was about to do. They turned him towards the church so that
Charlotte could see his puzzled face just a few metres away. Reckless, she rapped on the window, and William
smiled uncertainly as he recognized her, holding up his violin. ‘Good boy,’ she mouthed.

‘Give us a tune then, William!’ It was one of the Castroux men. William had no bow, but he plucked a little, pizzicato, searching
for a tune. The men took up the note and began to sing, not in Occitan but in French, William’s long fingers moving faster,
his eyes closed. They were taking it away from the fat man, transforming his torturing joke for William’s sake. Charlotte
knew the song, she had heard it many times in her years in Castroux, the story of a soldier who comes home from the wars to
find his bride at her wedding feast with another. ‘Go on, William!’ cried Charlotte, though she could hardly force her lips
to make the words and her eyes were swamped with tears of love for William and for all the men of the village. For a few seconds
it was beautiful. Then they shot William in the head from close behind so that Charlotte recoiled from the flesh that spattered
the window, but she could not stop watching as the front of his face flew off intact, the surprised eyes left behind in the
sockets, coming to rest in the dust and lying there white like a carnival mask.

Laurent struggled on through the dawn. His leg itched frantically, it was surely infected, though it had been worth it. His
bewilderment was deepened by the exhilaration of their success, and now he was soaked too, having forded the river below Saintonge.
He tried to think it through clearly. He and Prof had arrived back at ‘base camp’, as they called Pastre’s farm, without a
hitch, and the others, who had ridden in the truck, scrambled into the clearing an hour later. The truck had been fired down
a bank on the old Monguèriac road and, as they had expected, Pastre, Lebre, Nenet, Pan and Ceba had been able to watch the
dispatch rider pass on his way to the chateau from their hiding place in the woods. It had been about four o’clock, Laurent
reckoned, when he set off on foot back to the village. Physically he was exhausted, but he felt wide awake, fearless. The
plan was for him to return to Murblanc and wait until the village was clear. JC said the Americans were only days away. But
as he came to Chauvignat’s, he saw that there were lights in the village. He scrambled back
into the tree cover and worked his way slowly along, hampered by his crutch in the summer growth, until he was above Teulière,
from where he could make out that there were lights in the
Mairie
. It would be too risky to go through the village, so he doubled back and now, after an agonized hour of pushing along the
hedgerows, he was at Aucordier’s. Oriane might know something.

The kitchen door stood open and Laurent knew before he entered that there was no one inside, but he still went through the
big rooms, calling softly, hoping that William would hear his footsteps and jump out to surprise him. The cradle he had made
for Jacky was empty except for a little grey flannel rabbit with two mismatched buttons for eyes. Oriane must have stitched
it. The breakfast coffee was waiting in the pot by the fire, and Laurent was poking up the wood to heat it when he heard activity
on the road.

It came to him in the same few seconds it took to haul himself back up the stairs, when he realized the car was not stopping
in the yard. They knew no one was here, they hadn’t come looking. They had found the gun. They had searched the dance and
found the gun, they would know where it came from. Then they would have had the news from the railway. They would know immediately
that there was a connection because of the dead one. That would lead them to Papie. They would see that the dead soldier was
revenge because they had killed Papie. Then they would just have to look at the
Milice
list of the STO evaders for the names and if they were quick they would guess, and now, with the railway, they would know
who to look for. It must be because of him they had taken Oriane, they would be questioning her, assuming she knew.
Thank God he had never told her everything, but it was possible she might tell about the guns. They had Jacky too, she would
surely tell about the guns, and he couldn’t blame her.

They had his son, his baby boy. He thought of trying to get into the barn, from where he would be able to see any movement
on the road, but it was a risk that would tell him nothing. Laurent was not afraid for himself, though his body told him otherwise.
He could go to the chateau and give himself up, but that could betray the others. He groaned drily, wished that JC was there.
The only thing he could do was wait out the hours in the knowledge that whatever was happening in Castroux, to William and
Oriane and their child, it was all his fault.

René knew Officer Hummel well. They had spoken in the
Mairie
many times about regulations, the permission for the procession at
Toussaint
. Hummel had expressed his personal condolences about the terrible business of Papie Nadl and the
Milice
. He seemed a correct young man. René imagined he was well-educated, a gentleman in his own country, and apparently he played
the piano. Riding next to him in the truck, Hummel stared frigidly ahead like a passenger in a crowded train whose neighbour
has committed the indecency of falling asleep and slobbering on his shoulder.

‘I think this is the place.’

The other trucks pulled in behind. As they began the climb through the woods, René concentrated on placing his feet carefully,
scanning the undergrowth for the right opening of the steep path. He knew all the hunting tracks around the
village, but there was a part of him that wanted his eyes to miss the place, so they could just shoot him here in the woods.
Perhaps they would find it and he would have been wrong, his guess misplaced, and then they would shoot him too. Or even if
he was right they might still kill him. If he lived, he would have to explain. Père Guillaume would support him. No one else
in Castroux knew about Oradour. If this was the only way to save them, then surely it had to be the right, the only, the impossible
choice?