The Collaborators

Prologue

March 1945

Sur mes refuges détruits Sur mes phares écroulés Sur les murs de mon ennui J’écris ton nom

Paul Éluard, Liberté

1

She dreamt of the children.

They were picnicking on the edge of a corn field, Pauli hiding from his sister, Céci giggling with delight as she crawled through the forest of green stalks. Now she too was out of sight, but her happy laughter and her brother’s encouraging cries drifted back to their mother, dozing in the warm sunshine.

Suddenly there was silence, and a shadow between her and the sun, and a shape leaning over her, and a hand shaking her shoulder.

She sat up crying, ‘Jean-Paul!’

‘On your feet, Kraut-cunt. You’ve got a visitor.’

It was the fat wardress with the walleye who pulled her upright off the palliasse. A man in a black, badly-cut suit was standing before her. Without hesitation or embarrassment she sank to her knees and stretched out her hands in supplication.

‘Please, sir, is there any news of my children? I beg you, tell me what has happened to my children!’

‘Shut up,’ said the wardress. ‘Here, put on this hat.’

‘Hat?’ She was used to cruelty but not to craziness. ‘What do I want with a hat? Is the magistrate bored with the sight of my head?’

‘Your examination’s over, woman. Haven’t you been told? She should have been told!’

He spoke with a bureaucratic irritation which had little to do with human sympathy. The wardress shrugged and said, ‘She’ll have been told. She pays little heed this one unless you mention her brats. Now, put on the hat like the man says. See, it’s like one of them Boche helmets, so it should suit you.’

She was holding an old cloche hat in dirty grey felt.

‘Why must I wear a hat? This is lunacy!’

‘Janine Simonian,’ said the man. ‘The examining magistrate has decided that your case must go for trial before the Court of Justice set up by the Provisional Government of the Republic. I am here to conduct you there. Put on the hat. It will hide your shame.’

Janine Simonian was still on her knees as if in prayer. Now she let her arms slowly fall and leaned forward till she rested on her hands like a caged beast.

‘My shame?’ she said. ‘Oh no. To hide yours, you mean!’

Impatiently the wardress dropped the hat on her skull, but immediately Janine tore it off and hurled it at the official.

‘No! Let them see what they’ve done to me. I’ll strip naked if you like so they can see the lot. Let them see me as I am!’

‘That will be the purpose of your trial,’ said the official, retrieving the hat. ‘Now, if you please, madame.’

’Madame, is it? What a lot of changes! A hat, and madame. What’s wrong with Kraut-cunt? Or Bitch-face? Or Whore? Oh, Jesus Christ!’

She screamed as the wardress twisted her arms behind her and locked them together with handcuffs so tight that they crushed the delicate wrist-bones beneath the emaciated flesh.

‘You’ll hear worse than that before the trial’s over, dearie, never you fret,’ said the wardress, ramming the hat down over her brow with brutal force. ‘Now, on your feet and follow the nice man, though it’s a waste of time and money, if you ask me. Straight out and shot, that was the best way for your kind. I don’t know how they missed you.’

‘Keep your mouth shut, woman,’ ordered the court officer. ‘You’re a Government employee. Show some respect for the law.’

The wardress glared resentfully at his back as she urged Janine after him.

‘Jumped up fart-in-a-bottle,’ she muttered.

She got her revenge twenty minutes later as they paused outside the courtroom. Suddenly Janine lunged her head at the jamb. She gave her skull a sickening crack but she dislodged the hat. The official stooped to pick it up, but before he could retrieve it, the wardress had pushed Janine through the doorway.

On the crowded public benches, the ripple of expectancy surged momentarily into a chorus of abuse then almost instantly faded into an uneasy silence.

They had been expecting to see a woman they could hate. Instead they found themselves looking at a creature from another world, whose pale, set face, eroded to the bone line by hunger and cold, was completely dehumanized by the high, narrow dome of the shaven skull. In the six months since that first punitive shaving, her head had been razored three times more as an anti-vermin measure. Now the shadows of regrowing hair, and the scars and sores where the razor had been wielded with deliberate or accidental savagery, gave her skull the look of a dead planet. Even the jury, selected for their unblemished Resistance records, looked uneasy. There were only four of them. The new Courts of Justice were desperately overworked and personnel had to be spread thin. Janine, indifferent to change or reaction, fixed her gaze on the single presiding judge and cried, ‘Please, Your Honour, I don’t care what you do to me, but if you have any news of my children, please tell me. Surely I’ve a right to know, a mother’s right.’

For a moment the plea touched almost every heart, but at the same time it made her human again and therefore vulnerable, and they had come to wound.

‘Probably the little bastards’ve gone back to Berlin with their dad!’ a voice called out.

Eager for release from their distracting sympathy, the majority of those present burst into laughter. But this died away as a man on the benches reserved for witnesses leapt to his feet and cried angrily, ‘You’re wrong! Take that back! The father of this whore’s children was a hero and a patriot. Don’t slander him or his children. He couldn’t help his wife and they can’t help their mother.’

Again the courtroom was reduced to silence under the contemptuous gaze of the speaker, a man of about thirty with prematurely greying hair and a face almost as pale and intense as the prisoner’s. He leaned heavily on a stick, and on the breast of his smart black business suit he wore the ribbons of the Médaille de la Résistance and the Croix de l’Ordre de la Libération.

This time the judge, a grey-faced, tired man of perhaps fifty, broke the silence.

‘Monsieur Valois,’ he said. ‘We are delighted to see you restored to health and honoured to have you in court, particularly as your testimony is, I understand, essential to the prosecution of the case.’

Now his tone changed from polite respect to quiet vehemence.

‘However, you must remember that during the course of this trial you are as much subject to the discipline of our country’s laws as the prisoner herself. Therefore I would respectfully ask that you offer your testimony in due order and form.’

Christian Valois subsided slowly and the judge let his weary gaze move unblinkingly over the public benches. He had lost count of how many of these cases he had had to deal with since the Courts of Justice had finally creaked into operation here in Paris last October. He knew there was work enough to keep him busy for months, perhaps years to come. Well, it was necessary; justice required that those who had betrayed their country’s trust should be brought to account, and the people demanded it. But it was well for the people to know too that the days when the Resistance wrote its own laws were past, and the judiciary was back in control.

Satisfied that his point was made he said, ‘Now let us proceed.’

There was some legal preamble, but finally, in an intense silence, the charges were read.

‘Janine Simonian, born Crozier, you are accused that between a date unknown in 1940 and the liberation of Paris in August 1944 you gave aid and comfort to the illegal occupying forces of the German Army; that during the whole or part of this same period you acted as a paid informant of the secret intelligence agencies of the said forces; that you provided the enemies of your country with information likely to assist them in defeating operations and arresting members of the FFI; and more specifically, that you revealed to Hauptmann Mai, counter-intelligence officer of the German Abwehr, details of a meeting held in June 1944, and that as a result of this betrayal the meeting was raided, several resistants were captured and subsequently imprisoned, tortured and deported, and your own husband, Jean-Paul Simonian, was brutally murdered.’

The official reading the charges paused and the spectators filled the pause with a great howl of hatred. Janine heard all the abuse the wardress had promised.

She looked slowly round the room as if searching for someone, her gaze slipping as easily over the anxious faces of her parents as all the rest.

‘Janine Simonian, you must plead to these charges. How do you plead? Guilty or not guilty?’

She sighed deeply, seemed to shrug her thin shoulders and spoke inaudibly.

‘The court must be able to hear the prisoner’s plea.’

Again that shrug as if all this was irrelevant.

But now her eyes had found a face to fix on, the pale, drawn features of the man called Christian Valois, and she raised her voice just sufficiently to be heard.

‘Guilty,’ she said wearily. ‘I plead guilty.’

PART ONE

June 1940

Ils ne passeront pas!

Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain,

Verdun 1916

1

The poplar-lined road ran arrow-straight from north to south.

At dawn it was empty. The rising sun barred its white surface with the poplars’ shadows so that it lay like an eloper’s ladder against the ripening walls of corn.

Now a car passed down it fast.

A few minutes later there was another.

Both cars had their roof-racks piled high with luggage.

The sun climbed higher, grew hotter. By ten there was a steady stream of south-bound traffic. By eleven it had slowed to a crawl. And it no longer consisted solely of cars.

There were trucks, vans, buses, taxis; horse-drawn carts and pony-drawn traps; people on foot pushing handcarts, barrows, prams and trolleys; men, women and children and babes in arms; rich and poor, old and young, soldiers in blue, priests in black, ladies in high heels, peasants in sabots; and animals too, dogs and cats and smaller pets nursed by loving owners, cows, geese, goats and hens driven by fearful farmers; here in truth was God’s plenty.

By midday the stream was almost static, setting up a long ribbon of heat-haze which outshimmered the gentler vibration above the ripening corn. Cars broke down under the strain and were quickly pushed into the ditch by those behind. Janine Simonian sat in her tiny Renault, terrified that this would soon be her fate. The engine was coughing like a sick man. She glanced at her two small children and tried to smile reassuringly. Then she returned her gaze to the dark-green truck ahead of her and concentrated on its tailboard, as if by will alone she hoped to create a linkage and be towed along in its wake.

Her lips moved in prayer. She’d done a lot of praying in the past few weeks.

So far it hadn’t worked at all.

There were four of the green trucks, still nose to tail as they had been since they set off from Fresnes Prison that morning.

In the first of them, unbeknown to Janine, sat her cousin, Michel Boucher. It was to his sister, Mireille, living in what seemed like the pastoral safety of the Ain region east of Lyon, that she was fleeing.

Boucher himself wasn’t fleeing anywhere, at least not by choice. And given the choice, he wouldn’t have thought of his sister, whom he hadn’t seen for nearly ten years. Besides, he hated the countryside.

Paris was the only place to be, in or out of gaol. Paris was his family, more than his sister and her peasant husband, certainly more than his cousin and her fearful mother. Bloody shop-keepers, they deserved to be robbed. And bloody warders, they needed some sense kicked into them.

Rattling his handcuffs behind him he said, ‘Hey, Monsieur Chauvet, do we have to have these things on? If them Stukas come, we’re sitting ducks.’

‘Shut up,’ commanded the warder without much conviction.

He was thinking of his family. They were stuck back there in Paris with the Boche at the gate while he was sitting in a truck conveying a gang of evacuated criminals south to safety. Something was wrong somewhere!

‘Know what this lot looks like?’ said another prisoner, a thin bespectacled man called Pajou. ‘A military convoy, that’s what. Just the kind of target them Stukas like. We’d be better off walking.’

‘You think your mates would be able to spot you at a couple of hundred miles an hour, Pajou?’ said the warder viciously. ‘No, my lad, you’ll be getting your Iron Cross posthumously if the bastards come!’

Pajou looked indignant. He’d been a charge hand at a munition factory near Metz. A year before, he had been sentenced to eight years for passing information about production schedules to German Military Intelligence. He had always loudly protested his innocence.

Before he could do so now, Boucher rattled his cuffs again and pleaded, ‘Come on, chief, you know it’s not right. If them Stukas come, it’s like we were staked out for execution.’

The warder, Chauvet, opened his mouth, but before he could speak, Pajou cried, ‘Listen! Look!’

Looking and listening were almost the same thing. Two black spots expanded like ink stains in the clear blue sky in a crescendo of screaming engines; then came the hammering of guns, the blossoming of explosions; and the long straight river of refugees fountained sideways into the poplar-lined ditches as the Stukas ran a blade of burning metal along the narrow road.

Boucher saw bullets ripping into the truck behind as he dived over the side. With no protection from his arms, he fell awkwardly, crashing down on one shoulder and rolling over and over till a poplar trunk soaked up his impetus.

‘Jesus Christ!’ he groaned as he lay there half-stunned. All around were the cries and moans of the terror-stricken and the wounded. How long he lay there he did not know, but it was that other sound, heard only once but now so familiar, that roused him. The Stukas were returning.

Staggering to his feet he plunged deeper into the field which lay beyond the roadside ditch. What crop it held he could not say. He was no countryman to know the difference between corn and barley, wheat and rye. But the sea of green and gold stems gave at least the illusion of protection as the Stukas passed.

Rising again, he found he was looking into Pajou’s pallid face. His spectacles were awry and one lens was cracked but an elastic band behind his head had kept them in place.

‘You all right, Miche?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What now?’

Why the man should offer him the leadership, Boucher did not know. He hardly knew Pajou and didn’t care for what he did know. Robbing the rich was one thing, selling your country another.

But people often deferred to him, probably simply because of his appearance. Over six foot tall, Titian-haired, eagle-nosed, he had the kind of piratical good looks which promised excitement and adventure. Also he was known from his name as Miche the Butcher, and if his easy-going manner made anyone doubt his capacity for violence, his sheer bulk generally inhibited them from testing it.

But Pajou’s question was a good one. What now? Run till they found a friendly blacksmith?

‘Hold on,’ said Boucher.

An image from his mad flight from the road had returned to him.

He retraced his steps to the roadside. Lying in the ditch just as he had remembered was the warder. There was no sign of a bullet wound, but his head was split open. Despite the freedom of his arms, he must have fallen even more awkwardly than Boucher.

The bloody head moved, the eyes opened and registered Boucher, who raised his booted foot threateningly. With a groan, Chauvet closed his eyes and his head fell back.

Squatting down with his back to the body, Boucher undid the man’s belt, then fumbled along it till he came to the chain which held his ring of keys. It slid off easily.

Standing up, he found that Pajou had joined him.

Looking down at the unconscious warder, he said admiringly, ‘Did you do that? Christ, you can handle yourself, can’t you, Miche?’

‘Let’s go,’ said Boucher shortly.

They set off once more into the green-gold sea, sinking into it like lovers after a couple of hundred metres.

It took ten minutes working back to back to unlock the cuffs from Pajou’s wrists, two seconds then to release Boucher.

Released, Pajou was a different man, confident of purpose.

‘Come on,’ he said, massaging his wrists.

‘Where, for Christ’s sake?’

‘Back to Paris, of course,’ said Pajou in surprise. ‘With the Germans in Paris, the war’s over.’

‘Tell that to them back there,’ said Boucher curtly gesturing towards the road.

‘They should’ve stayed at home,’ said Pajou. ‘There’ll be no fighting in Paris, you’ll see. It’ll be an open city. Once the peace starts, it’ll be a German city.’

Boucher considered the idea. He didn’t much like it.

‘All the more reason to be somewhere else,’ he growled.

‘You think so?’ said Pajou. ‘Me, I think there’ll be work to do, money to be made. Stick with me, Miche. The Abwehr will be recruiting likely lads with the right qualities, and they’re bloody generous, believe me!’

‘So you did work for them,’ said Boucher in disgust. ‘All that crap about being framed! I should’ve known.’

‘It didn’t harm anybody,’ said Pajou. ‘If anything, it probably saved a few lives. The Krauts were coming anyway. Whatever helped them get things over with quickest was best for us, I say. It’s them silly military bastards who went on about the Maginot Line that should’ve been locked up. We must’ve been mad to pay any heed to a pathetic old fart like Pétain . . . Jesus Christ!’

Boucher had seized him by his shirt front and lifted him up till they were eye to eye.

‘Careful what you say about the Marshal, friend,’ he growled. ‘He’s the greatest man in France, mebbe the greatest since Napoleon, and I’ll pull the tongue out of anyone who says different.’

‘All right, all right,’ said Pajou. ‘He’s the greatest. Come on, Miche, let’s not quarrel. Like I say, stick with me, and we’ll be all right. What’s the difference between robbing the Boche and robbing our own lot? What do you say?’

For answer Boucher flung the smaller man to the ground and glowered down at him.

‘I say, sod off, you nasty little traitor. Go and work for the Boche if you must, and a lot of joy I hope you both get from it. Me, I’ll stick to honest thieving. I may be a crook, but at least I’m a French bloody crook! Go on, get out of my sight, before I do something I probably won’t be sorry for!’

‘Like kicking my head in like you did that warder’s?’ mocked Pajou, scrambling out of harm’s way. ‘Well, please yourself, friend. If you change your mind any time, you know how to find me! See you, Miche.’

He got to his feet and next moment was gone.

Michel Boucher sat alone in the middle of a field of waving cereal. It was peaceful here, but it was lonely. And when the bright sun slid out of the blue sky, he guessed it would also be frightening.