The Milliner's Secret (62 page)

‘I do.’

‘They’d fall off their chairs at Pettrew’s. I’m proud of you, Cora.’

‘Call me Cora one more time, I’ll punch you. I’m Mademoiselle de Lirac.’

He grinned. ‘And I’m Air Vice Marshal Flynn.’

‘You both need a change of clothes. I have to get you out of here.’ Dietrich might come looking for her at any time. He would see Donal as an enemy captive, to be treated according to the rules of the Geneva Convention. Ramon might as well have a firing-squad target pinned over his heart. She sniffed him. ‘Been sleeping rough?’

‘Running, chérie, not sleeping. Help me get back to my comrades. I have no money. My new English friend paid for my ticket.’

She took Ramon’s filthy beret, replacing it with a trilby that Georges had left behind. It changed his appearance immediately. Ramon’s jacket was stiff with dried blood. That was why he stank. She made him take it off and helped him into a trench coat she’d left there when the weather turned warm. Tight on him, but masculine enough not to draw attention. Coralie wished she’d had the foresight to keep a man’s suit here as well because Donal’s blue-grey trousers, blouson jacket and white sweater screamed ‘British airman’.

In the end, she had Donal and Ramon exchange jumpers, and discovered that both men carried pistols in side holsters. She made no comment. For Ramon, she fashioned a cravat from an offcut of cloth while Donal dulled his light brown flying boots with black ink and blue tailor’s chalk. After she’d added a slick of glycerin to his hair, he looked more like a local, particularly as he now had a morning’s growth of beard. Her finest touch was a black eye, conjured out of the makeup in her bag. Solange had left a bottle of red nail varnish behind and Coralie stippled tiny dots under Donal’s eye to resemble burst blood vessels. His face was already hatched with scratches and bumps from his rough landing. ‘We might as well make a virtue of it,’ she said.

Ramon considered her handiwork. ‘You’ve overdone the yellow.’

‘Listen, I’ve seen a few black eyes in my time.’ She said it again in English to Donal, adding, ‘I’ve seen them in the mirror.’

Donal shook his head, and she supposed there were things he didn’t like to be reminded of. ‘Right,’ she told him, ‘the story is, I’m taking you home because you were beaten by thugs outside a drinking den. If anybody stops us, say nothing and look dazed.’

It was agreed that Ramon would go ahead and they would meet at the corner of rue de Leningrad and rue du Berne, close to impasse de Cordoba. When it was their turn to leave, Coralie knotted her scarf over her hat and assembled a few useful items, including her left-handed scissors, wads of absorbent cloth, salt and ersatz coffee. Putting them in her bicycle basket, she thought of Dietrich. He would never track her to impasse de Cordoba – it would seem as though she’d abandoned him again.

Outside, she gruffly reminded Donal, ‘Traffic comes from the left over here. If we’re stopped, I do the talking. Anything goes wrong, run for it and we’ll meet at Gare de Lyon, where you arrived.’

‘You do the talking, I get to look dumb. Nothing changes, Coralie.’

‘At least you’re getting my name right.’

In the flat on impasse de Cordoba, she opened the window to air the place. Nobody had been inside since she’d last left it, and the smell of damp was unwelcoming. She made black coffee for them all. ‘I’ll go foraging in a moment, and contact a member of my circuit. You’ll both need money, and Donal needs false papers and a safe sanctuary beyond Paris.’

‘You trust your contact?’ Ramon demanded.

‘Sure I do – he wears Nazi uniform and shouts, “Sieg Heil!” every time we meet.’

‘Sarcasm is not only wasted, it is uncharitable to a man in my state.’

‘Then don’t ask daft questions.’ She make a strong salt solution with water from the kettle and held Ramon’s hand in it until the blood-caked bandage fell away from his finger. When he complained of shooting pains up his arm, she laid a hand to his brow. The bullet had got the middle joint of his wedding finger which was grotesquely inflamed, naked bone under a collar of ragged flesh. More ominously, black streaks radiated from the site. Damn right they needed a doctor.

Donal, meanwhile, was looking around the flat, a two-minute job. He flicked back the window curtain. ‘Reminds me of Barnham Street. Grey roofs and mean-eyed windows. I thought Paris was different.’

‘Most of it is.’

He turned, unsmiling. ‘Still, no worse than I’m used to in barracks. Cheers.’ He drank his coffee without making a face, so she guessed what they got at home was no better. Seeing Ramon slumped on the sofa, Donal said quietly, ‘What were the chances of running into him? I nearly fell down when I discovered he was your husband.’

‘He has the same effect on me.’ She took their cups away to wash. Something about Donal was making her nervous. It wasn’t just the physical changes in him she found hard to adjust to, it was his tone, his demeanour. The shy boy had always been easy to brush off and tease. This man was essentially a stranger and he looked at her the same way – as if she were a stranger he intended to know more about.

‘Did you mean to come to Paris?’ she asked, as she belted on the cheap cotton coat she kept in the flat. ‘Wouldn’t you have been better heading straight west, making for Spain?’

‘I wanted to find you.’ Still no smile. ‘Ramon was nervous about coming to you – worried the Gestapo might have you under surveillance, but we didn’t dare hang about south of the river. Not after I jumped from the train and got chased half a mile.’

‘Ramon’s a wanted man, you know that?’

He answered instead, ‘That time we met at the club, the Rose Noire? You were belting out “The Lambeth Walk”. When you told me you were married – ’ his voice caught ‘– I hadn’t known until then how much I’d always thought of you as my girl.’

She shook her head.

‘No. And you’re not his, either.’ He meant Ramon. ‘There’s a German, right?’ Donal had inadvertently smeared his painted black eye across his face and he looked like a chimney sweep. A sweep with hard blue eyes, searching her face for clues. It wasn’t just Donal questioning either, it was everything he represented. Homeland, King, comrades.

‘There are no Germans in my life,’ she told him. Why complicate matters? ‘I’d better go. Don’t go outside, stay away from the window and wash your face.’ She was out of the door before he could ask her anything else.

The shops were closed, of course, but the patron of her regular café sold her a tin of ham, green beans and a knobbly swede. He also filled the bottle she carried permanently in her bicycle basket with red wine.

Moineau had told her that in an emergency she could go to the Café de Finisterre opposite the entrance to Gare Saint-Lazare. He went there most days for lunch, he said, and always on a Sunday. If she missed him, the proprietor would summon him by telephone if she gave the code phrase ‘Cousin Charles’.

Lunch service was tailing off when she arrived at the café at a few minutes after two. No sign of Moineau – she’d probably missed him. Parking her bicycle where she could see it, she squeezed into a chair at a one-person table outside, allowing herself a moment to soak up the May sunshine. She’d have to order something, but it felt mean to eat a proper meal with Donal and Ramon waiting unfed. So she asked for an apple and a piece of cheese and tried to ignore the smell of baked fish and garlic. She paid with some of Donal’s emergency currency, and when the girl stared at the brand new note, explained she’d been to the bank the day before. ‘Fresh in from the treasury.’

‘Long time since I’ve seen anything so clean,’ the girl said – not the greatest advertisement for her café. She took a long time bringing a small plate with a wizened apple and a chunk of Camembert. Coralie was picking the last crumbs when she saw a familiar figure in a Dutch-boy cap parking his bicycle. Moineau called out a familiar greeting to the waitress. ‘Bring me whatever you’ve got, Annette.’

Coralie waited till the girl had gone before hissing, ‘Cousin Charles!’

Moineau gave a double-take, then looked around nervously. His corduroy trousers were tied at the ankle with string, the inside leg worn to a shine. He must cycle a great deal, she thought.

‘What’s up?’ He came and sat at her table.

She explained the situation, adding, ‘And we need a doctor, urgently.’

‘An English evader and a Resistance fighter? They didn’t come through us.’

‘They made their own way. You might as well know, the injured man is my husband, Ramon Cazaubon.’

Moineau gave her a long look. ‘Right. Where are they? At rue de Seine?’

‘Impasse de Cordoba. Yes, I know, it’s a dead-end passage and might be compromised, but I’m out of bolt-holes.’

‘So you need to move them on sharpish. Who do you normally link with?’

‘Francine, at quai d’Anjou, but you said she’d been arrested.’

‘Of course. I’ll make some calls.’

‘Is there a doctor you trust?’

‘Yes, and I’ll telephone him from here. Go back to Cordoba and wait. We’ll come when it’s dark. And, Cosette, take your airman’s gun away.’

‘How d’you know he’s got one?’

‘Some carry them. If he’s caught and he pulls a weapon, they won’t treat him as a prisoner of war, you know that.’

She nodded. ‘I’ll warn him.’

‘No, take the gun from him.’

The waitress brought her wine to drink, even though she hadn’t ordered it, and while Moineau went inside to make his telephone call, she allowed herself half a glass. Seeing the waitress serving a nearby table with plates of fish and green lentils, she decided to beg a clove of garlic and a knob of butter from the kitchen. She’d throw it in with the mashed swede, make it more palatable.

She walked through the café and into the lobby where the telephone was housed. Raising her hand to knock at the kitchen door, she heard the click of tokens going into the machine, followed by, ‘Hier ist Spatz.’

She lowered her fist. ‘Spatz’ was ‘sparrow’ in German. ‘Moineau’ meant sparrow too. Slowly, slowly, she turned.

He was hunched in the alcove, the telephone receiver shoving his cap to one side, corduroy trousers still tied at the ankle. She heard him say, ‘Reiniger,’ and in German, ‘Get me Major Reiniger, quickly.’

Coralie backed away, only to collide with the returning waitress, who dropped the tray she was carrying. Moineau looked out from his alcove, saw Coralie and rushed towards her, grabbing her satin choker which went taut, then broke.

It was that, rather than the incomprehensible betrayal, that made her rage spew over. ‘You were calling the Gestapo! You pig!’

‘Annette!’ Moineau shouted at the gawping waitress. ‘Get the patron. We need to put this girl in the cellar. Get him!’ Then, to Coralie as if wanting to appease her, ‘Look, we’re on the same side, aren’t w— Bitch!’

She’d kneed him in the groin, a half-baked jab because her coat skirts were hampering her. Moineau caught her right wrist in a powerful grip, bending her arm behind her back. ‘You sleep with Germans and I take their— ’ The word ‘money’ disappeared in a shout of pain as Coralie’s left-handed punch knocked his head sideways. Thanking Donal, who’d taught her that move, she followed up with a second blow that knocked Moineau’s cap off. Then she ran.