V for Vengeance (36 page)

Seeing her agitation, Kuporovitch walked over to the side-table
on which there was a decanter of brandy and some glasses. As he poured her out a stiff tot he said to the Mayor: ‘While we're in your house I fear you will have to regard us as an army of occupation. We shall take what we want, and I shall give you chits for it. After all, there won't be much difference between that and the worthless marks the German Army is foisting on the French people; although actually my paper is a better bet, as I am a comparatively honest person, and if I escape death or capture until the end of the war I shall pay you in real money afterwards.'

Ferrière groaned, but made no protest, as the Russian poured out two more goes of cognac for Pierre and himself. Then he looked across at the Mayor with an amused smile and said: ‘Won't you join us?'

‘Why not?' sighed his victim. ‘I might as well at least drink a small share of my own brandy.' It was his final surrender, and Kuporovitch knew then that they would have no more trouble with him, at all events for the time being.

When they had finished their drinks Pierre left them, it having been agreed that neither of the parties should attempt to get in touch with the other for the next few days, except in a case of emergency. He had hardly gone when Madame Chautemps came downstairs to say that the rooms were ready, and, well-satisfied with the evening's proceedings, having wished her and their host good-night, the two fugitives from the Gestapo went up to bed.

Next morning when they came down to breakfast the Mayor seemed to have accepted the situation which had been forced upon him, and his principal concern was now for the safety of his precious stamp collection. Madeleine assured him that Pierre was absolutely honest and that there was no cause to fear that it would not be returned intact to him in due course if all went well.

When he had gone out to his official duties Kuporovitch made a full inspection of the house to ascertain its resources. He had no food-card of his own, and they dared not present Madeleine's. They could not go out in daylight while the shops were open, yet they had to live somehow and might even have to face a lengthy siege there.

Monsieur Ferrière's cellar was a great disappointment as,
although, like all Frenchmen, he knew what was good from having been born with a natural palate, he was a very moderate drinker and never entertained. The cellar held only about three dozen bottles of claret, burgundy and sauterne, five bottles of brandy, two of Armagnac, and no champagne, liqueurs or non-French wines at all. On the other hand, a second cellar revealed that
Monsieur le Maire
had had the forethought to lay in a good supply of emergency stores, and the piles of tins and boxes comforted the Russian with the thought that they would certainly not suffer from starvation for several weeks at least.

Madeleine meanwhile had a chat with Madame Chautemps, during which they arranged to share the work of the house between them. Food was now becoming so difficult to obtain that even the possession of a ration-card was no definite guarantee of actually getting the goods, and to make certain of doing so it was often necessary to queue up early at the shops in order to get one's share before the items ran out. In consequence, shopping was a lengthy process, and it was decided that the housekeeper should give most of her time to it while Madeleine made all the beds and kept the house clean.

That evening they waited with some anxiety for the Mayor's return, since, in spite of his apparently philosophic acceptance of their presence, there was still a chance that he might decide to risk his stamp collection as less precious than his life—which would be in jeopardy as long as they remained with him—but he arrived back at his normal hour, showing no change of attitude from that which he had displayed in the morning.

When he saw that dinner consisted mainly of things from his hoarded stores he began to complain most bitterly, saying that the food situation would get infinitely worse before the war was over and that at this rate they would consume the whole of his stock in a month.

Kuporovitch told him not to worry, as when the hue and cry for Madeleine and himself had died down a little he would be able to go out again and somehow or other would obtain additional supplies.

The week passed quickly, as although neither of the refugees showed their noses outside the house there was
plenty to do inside it, even for the Russian, who was by no means a bad cook, and had volunteered to take over the preparation of the meals.

On Sunday, November the 10th, the news came through that Libreville, the capital of Gabon in West Africa, had surrendered to General de Gaulle and the Free French Forces; so, in spite of Ferrière's anti-de Gaullist feelings, they held a little celebration at which they insisted that Madame Chautemps should join them, selecting for dinner that night some of the Mayor's most precious tinned foods and a few of the best bottles of wine from his cellar.

Now that they had been for eight days in the house Kuporovitch felt the time had come when, provided that he exercised caution, he might go out occasionally with reasonable safety. On the Monday he telephoned Ribaud and fixed a meeting for that night at the Café du Rhône, just round the corner.

The French detective was in a high good humour. He had heard three days before from Lacroix that the little Colonel had succeeded in getting safely away and that he was now back in Vichy. Gregory too had escaped, but parted from Lacroix on the night that the home was raided to make his own way back to England; and as Kuporovitch had enormous faith in Gregory's ability to look after himself this was great good news.

They laughed a lot over the way in which the Quisling Mayor of Batignolles had been pressed against his will into the service of the Free French cause, and Ribaud was pleased to hear that Pierre Ponsardin had also managed to evade capture and could be found when wanted at his old address. As they spoke of their friends who had been caught in the home their laughter left them, as both of them knew that nothing could be done to help these poor people. They must be written off just like soldiers who had fallen on the battlefield, only to be remembered with honour; but their number was not large and, according to Ribaud, their loss would have no very serious effect upon the ever-growing movement to sabotage the German war effort and eventually restore freedom to France.

On the nights that followed Kuporovitch went out on other missions. He was an old soldier and a scrounger of the first
water, who, considering himself at war again, had no scruples whatever about looting, now that he was living in enemy territory. His first exploit was to break into Lavinsky's office in the early hours of one morning, and he came away with a sackful of samples of black market goods that he had seen there. They used some of them later that week in another celebration dinner when the splendid news leaked through that the British Fleet Air Arm had scored a magnificent victory by torpedoing a number of Italy's most powerful warships in Taranto harbour. But in Paris that week this good news was more than offset by the knowledge that the Germans had, contrary to the armistice agreement, incorporated the French province of Lorraine into the Greater Reich and had begun forcibly to deport all French citizens from it.

Now that one-half of France was occupied, and the other in a state of uneasy non-belligerence with Germany, there were no steps at all which the French could take by way of retaliation, and the Nazis' cynical disregard for the terms of the armistice spread a gloom over all Paris. Madeleine became subject to the general helpless anger and depression, but Kuporovitch sought to console her by saying that, apart from the unfortunate folk who were actually being deported, the measure would do their own cause good in the long run, as it would show the French people more clearly than ever that no faith could ever be put in the word of the Nazis and that collaboration with them could only end in France being devoured piecemeal.

Kuporovitch's night forays mostly took him out to the nearer suburbs, as he did not like to rob the smaller shops. During the autumn nearly everyone who had a garden had dug it up to grow vegetables against the winter, and selecting the larger ones in a different neighbourhood each night he pilfered potatoes from one, greens from a second, fruit from a third, and so on. Occasionally, also, he secured a chicken or a tame rabbit; all of which good fresh food made a better contribution to the Mayor's table than two extra rations would have done, and helped them to sustain themselves against the rigours of the cold, which continued to prove their greatest inconvenience.

Ferrière's wireless was only a small one upon which they
could not listen to foreign broadcasts, but there had now sprung up in Paris such a thirst for outside news that, in spite of the heavy penalties announced by the Germans for listening to the B.B.C., or passing on statements made in its bulletins, practically every shopkeeper had become a channel for forbidden information, so Madame Chautemps was able to furnish them with the latest news after her daily shopping expeditions and long waits in queues.

The German aerial assault on Britain seemed to have petered out, but on November the 15th they again launched one of the biggest blitzes that they had ever attempted against London; yet the following day the underground grapevine news service showed the writing on the wall. The Nazis had lost seventeen planes destroyed against one British.

With the passing days, Madeleine began to get increasingly anxious about her mother. It was now over a fortnight since she had been to see her. The old lady knew nothing of her daughter's secret activities, but by this time would be wondering why Madeleine had neglected her for so long. In consequence, they got in touch with Pierre, and he came to dine with them.

He reported that Madame Lavallière was much as usual, except that she suffered most severely from the cold and whenever he went in to see her she was always complaining of her daughter's neglect. As Kuporovitch absolutely forbade Madeleine to go to see her, it was agreed that Pierre should tell Madame Lavallière, without giving her any details, that Madeleine had made herself liable to prosecution by the police through repeating news given out by the B.B.C., so she had had to change her address and disappear for the time being, and she might be caught if she visited her old home, although she would do so as soon as the affair had blown over.

Pierre said that Ribaud had been to see him only the previous day and told him that fresh arrangements had now been made for continuing underground work against the enemy, and that he was to go to a certain house where he would be given a number of pamphlets, which he was to distribute at night by pushing them through letter-boxes; so he would be on the job again very shortly.

On November the 20th it was announced with a great blare
of trumpets that Hungary had joined the Axis, but nobody took very much notice of that, as for a long time past it had been clear that the wretched Hungarians had very little option in resisting German pressure, once it was brought to bear upon them. As against that the Greeks were standing up magnificently to the Italian invasion, and a few days later the news trickled through that they were now advancing on all fronts.

This good news gave Kuporovitch another opportunity to indulge his love of celebrations, and in order to produce something special for the feast he put into execution a plan which he had been considering for some days. For the first time since he had been living in Ferrière's house he took the risk of going out in daylight, and late in the afternoon paid a visit to the Paris Zoo, to inform himself where the cages and compounds of various animals were situated. That night he went back again, and, having got in under cover of the darkness, he captured and killed a small roebuck, which he brought home in triumph, thus providing the household for some days with most excellent venison.

It was the morning after this exploit that the people of Paris were once more driven to fresh anger and hatred against their oppressors. Fifteen French newspapers had published accounts of the havoc caused by British air attacks on Le Havre, and all fifteen were suppressed, thus robbing the Parisians of one of their main sources of material for the eternal discussions which they loved to hold in their cafés.

On the 28th Ribaud telephoned and asked Kuporovitch to meet him in the Café du Rhône that evening. When he arrived, instead of asking him to sit down, the detective took him straight out to the car, which he was still allowed to run on account of his official duties. Once they were in it he said: ‘The big Chief's in Paris again and asked me to bring you to see him at his new headquarters.'

As they drove through the almost deserted streets the detective told his companion with grim satisfaction about the death of M. Chiappe, which had occurred the day before. Chiappe had been a cunning and ambitious Corsican who had climbed to power with Laval and at one time had been Chief of the Paris Police. Lacroix, who had had to work
with him, had loathed him, as had Ribaud and most of his other subordinates.

Apparently the Vichy Government had grounds for distrusting the Governor of Syria and feared that he might go over to de Gaulle; so the Quisling Chiappe had been sent to supersede him. But the aircraft in which he had set off the day before had got mixed up in an air-battle between British and Italian planes, which was raging over a sea-battle off the coast of Sardinia that had resulted in the British Navy inflicting severe damage on an Italian battleship and three cruisers. The plane in which Chiappe was travelling had been shot down by an Italian pilot who mistook it for one of the enemy, and Ribaud was immensely tickled to think that this ace-Quisling whom he had had reason to hate personally had come to such an unexpected and sticky end.

They drove right across Paris and on past the Luxembourg to the Observatoire, near which Ribaud left his car in a garage; then they walked for a little distance across the Place Denfert-Rochereau to the Avenue d'Orléans and entered the courtyard of a large private house on the right side of the road.