The Sisters of St. Croix (45 page)

“A man from the resistance. I don’t know his name. I’d never seen him before.”

“If you didn’t know him, why did he bring the family to you?”

“The convent is a Christian house,” replied Mother Marie-Pierre. “I suppose he must have thought we would give shelter to any family in danger.”

“Because you’d done it before!” snapped Hoch. “That’s why he came to you! A secret room was prepared in the cellar. I saw it with my own eyes. You knew they were coming… or someone in the convent did. Someone prepared that hiding place… if not you, who? The girl? She worked in the convent. She came in each day. You had to have help from the outside. Who is she… the one that prepared the room?”

“I did it.” The words were scarcely more than a croak. Sister Marie-Marc had opened her eyes and was staring up at the colonel. “I made the room. Mother didn’t even know about it until the Auclons were there.”

Mother Marie-Pierre dropped to her knees beside her sister. “It’s all right, Sister,” she said, “you don’t have to say any more.”

“Oh, I think she does,” Hoch said, pushing Reverend Mother aside. “Go on, Sister, what about the girl? The young woman who took the children away and then came back for the parents tonight? Who is she?”

“I don’t know,” murmured Sister Marie-Marc, her eyes closing again.

Hoch bent down and lifted Sister Marie-Marc’s head from the floor, peering at her swollen face before letting her head drop with a sharp crack onto the stone floor. “I don’t think she’ll survive tonight,” he remarked, glancing up at Reverend Mother. “I shall leave you to consider now,” he went on. “We shall resume in the morning. I shall bring another of my men who is specially trained in interrogation. Perhaps he will be more persuasive than I am.” He walked to the door and then glanced back at the figure on the floor. “It’s a pity you weren’t more helpful. You could have saved her a lot of pain.”

Mother Marie-Pierre held his gaze. “Will you send in some water so I can bathe her face?”

“No, Reverend Mother, I will not.”

“And a bucket, or something… for our needs?”

“You can squat in the corner,” he replied cheerfully, pointing to an open drain hole. “Something you’ll have to get used to, I expect. There’ll be few conveniences at the camps where we send enemies of the Reich.” He rapped sharply on the door three times and Mother Marie-Pierre heard the bolt being drawn back. The door opened, the colonel left, and as the door closed behind him, the light went out.

Mother Marie-Pierre bent down in the darkness and tried to ease Sister Marie-Marc from the floor onto the narrow bed. As she did so, the elderly nun murmured. “You didn’t tell him did you? About Adèle and the children?”

“No, Sister, I didn’t tell him.”

“Thank God.” She groaned as she tried to move. “Don’t tell him to save me. I’m old, they’re young. Don’t tell him. Evil! Evil man!”

“It’s all right, Sister, stay still,” soothed Reverend Mother. “When it gets light we’ll have a look at your bruises. It’s all right.” She rested the nun’s head in her lap. There was little else she could do for her until she could see, except pray.

It’s all right, she’d said, but it wasn’t all right at all. Mother Marie-Pierre knew that Hoch would be back in a few hours, and the interrogation would start again. Would he use Sister Marie-Marc again to try and make her talk? Would he reverse the process and attack her, Reverend Mother, in an effort to make Sister Marie-Marc tell what she knew? So far they had been subjected to Hoch’s bullyboy tactics, but there were other ways of extracting information from an unwilling prisoner. And so she prayed, through the darkest hours of her life, prayed for strength and guidance, for deliverance for them all. Truly, she thought, we are in the valley of the shadow of death.

As the dawn light crept in through the grubby window, Mother Marie-Pierre was able to see the damage Hoch had done with his boot. Sister Marie-Marc lay in an uneasy doze, her face was swollen, her nose broken with one eye almost closed. Damping a corner of her own blood-soaked handkerchief with saliva, Reverend Mother wiped away some of the blood that had crusted round the old nun’s nose. Sister Marie-Marc’s breathing was uneven, and even in her fitful sleep she moaned and muttered with pain. Mother Marie-Pierre’s own face ached appallingly. Her right eye had swollen from Hoch’s punch, and she, too, was finding it difficult to breathe through her nose.

Outside she heard the sounds of a new day, men’s voices and the heavy tread of boots. She urgently needed to relieve herself, and unwilling to have an audience for this, she gently eased the sleeping Sister Marie-Marc off her lap and went to the drain in the corner. When she returned to the bed she realised that Sister Marie-Marc was not asleep, but had drifted off into unconsciousness. Mother Marie-Pierre hammered on the door, trying to attract the attention of a guard, to get help, but if anyone heard her hammering, it was ignored. No one came. No one brought food or water. They were left in the cold silence of the cell. Occasionally there were sounds from outside; once she heard a piercing scream and the slamming of a door. Again she hammered on their door, but to no avail.

It was several hours before the bolts were again drawn back and Hoch strode in. He had not been idle in those hours and he was delighted with the results of his labours. He had begun by interrogating the Jews. Using the same technique, as with the nuns, he had them brought together in a cell. There Joseph was handcuffed to the wall, forced to watch as Hoch began to work on Janine. First he stripped her and then forced her to lie on her back, naked on the narrow bed, tying her wrists and ankles to the bed legs so that she was stretched out like a sacrifice. She had struggled against him, but she was no match for his strength, and a sudden punch to her head had sent her flying. She had screamed with fear and Hoch had shrugged. “You can scream all you like,” he said. “No one can hear you… and if they can, they won’t come.”

He glanced across at the pale-faced man. “You only have to answer my questions, Jew, and her pain will be over.” He had few of the more refined instruments of torture that were available at the Gestapo headquarters in Amiens, but Janine’s shrieks of pain as cigarettes were applied to her breasts and genitals soon had her husband singing like a nightingale. Within an hour Hoch had all the information he needed. His only failure was that the children were lost to him. Even the threat to put out his wife’s eyes had not produced the required information from Joseph, screaming frantically that he didn’t know. Hoch had come, reluctantly, to believe that he really didn’t know where his children had been taken. But Hoch now knew about everything else. About the Charbonniers, how they had let the family hide in the loft of the derelict cottage and kept them supplied with food; about the Launays, who had some connection with a girl called Antoinette who had brought them to hide in the convent; about a man called Marcel who had arrived with Antoinette to collect the children, one at a time, and taken them away. Hoch had not even needed the services of his “specialist” interrogator. He and he alone had this information. He would be the one to round up this little group of
résistants.
He would get the credit; none for the mealy-mouthed apology for a major, Thielen. He would stamp his authority on this place once and for all. And then maybe, just maybe, he would be moved from this godforsaken area to a more prominent job, in Paris perhaps. He had proved that the dreadful truth that his grandmother had been a Jew did not stop him from hunting down Jews wherever they hid, and sending them to the camps where they belonged.

This information culled was all he needed. Returning from the Jews’ cell, he sat down in his office to consider just exactly what he did know. The information about the fugitives at the convent had come in an anonymous letter. Hoch got it out of his desk now to look at it again. Written on cheap, lined paper, it was scrawled in pencil and simply said, “
She’s hiding them in the convent! The girl had one of the children.
” Of course it was unsigned, and the writer gave no clue to his or her identity, but Hoch, guessing who had sent it, had decided to act on it.

The information had proved correct, and Hoch was in no doubt now that the “she” must be the mother superior. Someone in the convent did not like her, the letter having been sent for private purposes; an informer who wanted some sort of reward would surely have made herself known. This fitted his theory that the letter had come from the nun he had dealt with before, Sister Marie-Something. She wanted to run the convent and was content to co-operate with the Germans if necessary, to do so. She might want to be rid of Reverend Mother, but so did he. He would tolerate no subversives in his area, and Mother Marie-Pierre was certainly that. The other nun, whoever she was, had been taken simply to implement his earlier threat. His point had been made, and emphatically made at that—there would be no further participation for the nuns in this war.

Hoch contacted the HQ in Amiens and arranged for one of the lorry transports on its way to Drancy, the transit camp outside Paris, to be diverted to pick up the prisoners. He had no further need of any of them. The Jews would be off to Drancy in a couple of hours, and the nuns could go with them.

That still left the question of Antoinette. Who was she? Was she the young woman at the convent? Almost certainly she was, so he could get her name easily enough. There would be no problem bringing in the Charbonniers and the Launays, they’d soon be made to talk. The only one he had little information on was the mysterious Marcel. No doubt Antoinette could furnish that information, and who knew where that might lead to?

There was also the mysterious disappearance of the weasel informer, Fernand. Since tipping them off about the Jews in the first place, he had made no contact. Where was he? Fernand, or rather his disappearance, had irritated Hoch. He wanted to know what the man was up to, so he’d sent Weber to Fernand’s house, either to bring Fernand in, or find out where he was. Weber had returned with Fernand’s landlady.

“Where is Monsieur Fernand, Madame?” Hoch had asked, almost civilly.

Martine Reynaud was terrified to find herself in the German headquarters and her voice shook as she answered. “I don’t know, Monsieur.”

“When did you last see him?”

“I don’t know, Monsieur. A few days ago. He comes and goes as he pleases.”

“But you must know when he’s in the house.”

Certainly Martine knew when the brute was in the house, with his demands for cooked meals, washing and mending to be done, boots to be cleaned. She had relished the peace of the last few days when he had made no appearance at all. She had not dared to hope that he might never come back and she might regain the use of her own home, but now this German officer with the skulls on his shoulder was glowering at her… and he was far more frightening than Fernand.

“Sometimes, sometimes not. He’s always out and about, Monsieur,” stammered Martine.

Hoch knew there was nothing more to be learned from her and he dismissed her. “When he comes back, you’re to let me know. But remember, Madame, there will be no need to tell him you have been here today.”

“Yes, Monsieur, I mean no, Monsieur,” gabbled the woman, and scurried out of his office.

Hoch considered what he had learned. Fernand had obviously disappeared. He, Hoch, would look into the matter later on. If Fernand were dead he wasn’t going anywhere, and if he wasn’t, well, he’d turn up sooner or later. He could be lying low, afraid, because his information proved to be out of date. Or perhaps something had happened to him? Hoch realised that he must be known locally as an informer, and probably a lot more besides. Had he met with an accident? It was more than possible that he had been silenced by one of his neighbours. Hoch did not particularly care whether the man was alive or dead, but if he had been murdered by the cell of
résistants
he was seeking now, the murder of a Frenchman would more than justify their arrest and execution when the time came.

Today, however, Hoch was concentrating on the girl and Marcel. Once he had them he’d have time for everyone else.

When he returned to the nuns’ cell, he found that the older one was in a bad way. She lay on the bed, moaning softly as Mother Marie-Pierre tried to soothe her. She had removed Sister Marie-Marc’s starched collar and cleaned her face as best she could with her handkerchief. As Hoch walked in the reverend mother appealed to him again. “For pity’s sake, Colonel, let them bring me some water. Sister Marie-Marc is feverish, she needs water to drink, and I need to bathe her face.”

Hoch looked down, unperturbed, at the old woman on the bed. “You can have some water,” he said, “and then get her ready to go.”

“Go!” Mother Marie-Pierre leapt to her feet. “Go where? She’s in no state to go anywhere. Let her be taken back to the convent so her sisters can care for her.”

“You are being taken to a prison camp,” he told her, “and she will go with you.”

“In the name of God, have you no pity?”

“For enemies of the Reich, no, Reverend Mother, I have not.” He walked to the door and then paused. “By the way, the Jews gave me the information I needed. I shall soon arrest all the others concerned in this little affair. You will be brought out when the transport arrives.” Hoch stared at her for a moment. “You are a meddlesome woman, nun, and you have brought this on yourself… and on her.”

“And you are an evil man, Colonel,” Mother Marie-Pierre replied quietly. “May God have mercy on you and forgive you, for I never will.” She turned back to Sister Marie-Marc. For a moment she thought he might strike her, but he simply gave a harsh laugh and left the cell slamming the door behind him and ramming home the bolt. Not long after that the soldiers had come for them.

Adelaide watched with mounting anguish. What right had anyone to treat another human being as Hoch had clearly treated his prisoners, as the desperate men and women in the truck were being treated? Her fury threatened to boil over, but there was nothing she could do. Nothing to avert what was happening. She willed Sarah to look in her direction, so that Sarah would know that she, Adelaide, was safe; so that Sarah would know she and Sister Marie-Marc had not been deserted. Sister Marie-Marc, her face almost unrecognisable, was clinging to Sarah, muttering incoherently.