The Collaborators. Reginald Hill
at l’Étoile had brought him hurrying here, hoping against hope that somehow his disturbances had moved on in space and time.
The corporal grew angry. The little fairy was apparently taking the piss about last night’s abortive ambush! Only his eagerness to get to bed stopped him from arresting him. He turned away. The Frenchie grasped his shoulder! That did it. He turned and hit him in the gut. Melchior sank to the ground. The corporal swung back his foot.
‘No,’ said a voice from a staff-car which had drawn up alongside.
Through tear-clouded eyes, Melchior recognized a face. No. Two faces. One, looking at him through the window, was Colonel Fiebelkorn’s. The other, less frightening but more incredible, belonged to a man getting out of the car. He looked at Melchior and smiled as he walked past. It was Émile.
‘Monsieur Melchior,’ said Fiebelkorn opening the door. ‘Won’t you join me?’
For days there were rumours of pitched battles, hundreds killed, thousands arrested. The truth was less dramatic. No deaths, a few injuries, and only one arrest on a serious charge.
‘Some poor devil miles away from the demos got jostled by a drunken Boche and jostled back. Now he’s facing the death penalty for violence against the German Army! At least it’ll show people what kind of monsters we’re up against.’
‘Isn’t that a big price to pay for an illustration?’ wondered Janine.
‘Don’t give me that bourgeois sentimental crap,’ retorted Valois.
‘All I mean is a man’s life seems more important to me than anything else.’
‘Oh yes? And to get Jean-Paul home safe and sound, how many death-warrants would you be prepared to sign? One? Two? Three? A hundred?’
‘I don’t know. That’s different. It would depend…I don’t know!’
‘It’s a question of objectives and priorities, isn’t it?’ said Valois bleakly.
‘Christian, are you a communist?’ asked Janine.
‘Don’t be silly,’ he replied, suddenly gay. ‘Didn’t you know, the communists are Herr Hitler’s friends, bound to him by formal agreement? They’re finding it even harder to be consistent than you are!’
It was true. This seemed a time of inconsistencies. On December 15th the Marshal had his vice-president, Laval, arrested. Abetz, the German ambassador, immediately went to Vichy to have him released. Meanwhile, at midnight on December 16th, a gun carriage rumbled through the curfew-emptied snow-feathered streets flanked by a mixed escort of French and German soldiers. On the carriage was a coffin containing the body of the Duke of Reichstadt, Napoleon’s only son, exhumed from the imperial vault in Vienna, and returned at Hitler’s own behest to be set at his father’s side in Les Invalides. For a short while Bayreuth came to Paris and under the flaming torches of this Wagnerian stage-setting, all the civic dignitaries, French and German alike, shivered through their walk-on parts. This conciliatory gesture was followed a week later by the execution of the man arrested during the November demonstrations.
Then it was Christmas.
‘You must go to your parents, for the children’s sake, especially, but for your own sake too,’ said Sophie firmly.
‘But what about you?’ said Janine. ‘Why should you be left alone at Christmas?’
Sophie laughed merrily.
‘What are you saying? An old Jewess alone at Christmas? What’s Christmas to me, liebchen?’
‘All right, I’ll go,’ said Janine. Then she added, guiltily aware that despite her objection she had really made up her mind before Sophie spoke, ‘I was going to anyway.’
‘I knew you were,’ said the old lady laughing. ‘You’re a good daughter.’
‘You think so?’ said Janine doubtfully. ‘I don’t always feel it. I don’t feel grown-up yet. Adults should be prepared to suffer the consequences of their own decisions, shouldn’t they? In any case, it’s me who has the rows with maman, but it’s papa and the children who suffer the consequences.’
Sophie shook her head.
‘Yes, when I first knew you, that was very much how you were. But you’ve grown a lot since then, child. And you’re still growing.’
‘Am I? Have I far to go, Bubbah?’ she asked, half-mocking, half-serious.
‘Further than I care to see, it sometimes feels,’ said the old lady, for a moment very frail and distant. But before Janine could express her concern, Sophie laughed and said with her usual energy, ‘And when I said you were a good daughter, I meant to me as well as to Madame Crozier.’
The welcome they received on Christmas Eve made Janine ashamed that she could even have dreamt of staying away. Louise burst into tears of joy at seeing them and later, while she was out of the room putting the children to bed, Claude said confidentially to his daughter, ‘If you’d not come here, we were going to come round to see you tomorrow.’
‘Maman too? But she said she’d never visit Sophie’s flat again.’
Never set foot in that heathen temple had been the precise phrase.
‘I told her it was Christmas and she’d have to swallow her pride,’ said Claude. ‘She shouted at me a bit, but deep down she wanted to be told.’
‘Yes,’ said Janine ruefully. ‘I know how she feels.’
The truce lasted all that evening and even survived Janine’s amazement the next morning at the way in which rationing and growing food shortages did not seem to have affected her mother’s preparations for Christmas dinner. Probably all over Paris, housewives were performing similar miracles, she assured herself. But she had a feeling this miracle had started with a bit more than a few loaves and fishes.
Just on midday with the house rich with the smell of baking and boiling and roasting, the door burst open to admit a tall, broad-shouldered, red-bearded man, resplendent in a beautifully cut suit, pale grey almost to whiteness, a virginal silk shirt and a flowered necktie fastened with a diamond-studded gold pin. He had the look of a pirate king dressed up for his bosun’s wedding. On his arm was an elegantly furred woman with tight black curls, a great deal of make-up, bright-red nail varnish and a good figure, slightly thickening with rather heavy thighs.
‘My God, Miche, is that you?’ said Janine.
‘Cousin Janine, how are you, girl?’ Boucher cried, stooping to give her a kiss which went a little way beyond the cousinly. His beard was soft and fragrant with attar of roses.
‘I hoped you’d be here. I’ve brought a few things for the kids. Hey, this is Hélène Campaux, by the way. La Belle Hélène, eh? She dances at the Folies. Some mover! Now where are those kids? And where’s the old folks?’
‘I think they’re in the bakehouse,’ said Janine. ‘I’ll go and tell them…’
Warn them, she meant. But it was too late.
The door opened.
Madame Crozier stopped dead in her tracks when she saw the newcomers.
Then spreading her arms, she cried, ‘Michel, my dear. You’ve come!’
And with an expression of amazement which matched anything her father ever produced, Janine saw these old antagonists embrace with all the fervour of dear friends, long parted.
It soon became clear that the reconciliation had taken place some time before and obviously had much to do with Cousin Miche’s new affluence. He presided over the feast like a red-bearded Father Christmas, commandeering Pauli’s help to fetch in from a rakish Hispano-Suiza bottles of champagne, a smoked ham, a tub of pâté de foie gras and a whole wheel of Camembert. In addition there were