Paris Noir

THE REDHEAD by CARA BLACK

We must never let the new generations forget what happened here during the Occupation, in their own neighbourhood, the horrors, the deportations,’ Monique, the lycée teacher, said, her eyes sombre. ‘Your presentation on the Resistance will be so welcome… Your work is so important.’

Lucien had just handed the young brunette their Resistance Association pamphlet and smiled. ‘We’re proud to speak with your students,’ he said. ‘That’s our mission here.’

They stood in the small Association office overlooking Canal Saint Martin, with the carved woodwork ceiling, a non-working marble fireplace, and second-hand file cabinets. Mina, a widowed great-grandmother, sat at the worn metal desk affixing address labels on envelopes. Lucien combed back his white hair with his fingers, then gestured to her. ‘Mina and I do what we can. We’re the old-timers and have been doing this work for years. Call and we’ll arrange it.’

Lucien showed the teacher out, opened Le Parisien and sat down. Outside the window, bicycles sped along the cobbled Canal Saint Martin quai; an arched metal bridge spanned the dark green strip of water framed by the blue-washed sky.

‘Tant pis!’ Lucien’s age-sported finger stabbed at an article on the newspaper’s second page. ‘The redhead’s publishing her “Resistance memoirs”.’

‘Her lies, you mean,’ said Mina, shaking her grey-haired head. ‘As if she’d admit being a Jew who slept with a German soldier!’

‘According to this,’ Lucien said, ‘she implies we killed him.’

Mina dropped the volunteer labels on the desk.

‘But how can…?’ The words caught in Mina’s throat as she remembered that rainy July night in 1943. The Wehrmacht’s marching jackboots echoing on the street, below in the damp, dripping cellar, bricking the soldier’s body in the wall by sputtering candlelight. The image of his pink cheeks, the blond hair flashed in front of her.

‘Eh? I don’t believe it, Lucien.’ Mina pulled the sweater tighter around her thin frame.

Jews hid in the quartier to avoid deportation; in coal bins, in attics, in cellars. And in this one cellar, bad luck had it, Lucien’s mother, then the concierge, had hidden their Hebrew school teacher. But La Rouquine, their comrade who lived upstairs, hadn’t known. She’d arranged a rendezvous in the cellar with her lover. Her jackbooted soldier in Feldgrau, the green-grey hue that still sickened Mina.

‘Read that, Mina.’

Mina adjusted her glasses and read ‘nicknamed La Rouquine for her red hair, the author, widow of the former Interior Minister, reveals her exploits with the Resistance on Canal Saint Martin and new theories about her father’s wartime disappearance connected to the suspected murder of a Wehrmacht sergeant…’

Mina stifled the fear welling inside her. ‘Our names aren’t there, Lucien. Relax. That happened in wartime, more than sixty years ago. He was the enemy. What does a dead Nazi matter now?’

‘Keep reading.’

‘La Rouquine insists on setting the record straight concerning a Wehrmacht sergeant who, she claims, allowed Jews to escape and was murdered by Resistants ignorant of his true sympathies.’ Mina’s voice wavered. ‘La Rouquine will show the press Resistance hideouts in a network of cellars including the murder site, in her words, of “a noble” German, following her book launch on Friday.’

Mina crumpled the newspaper.

‘As if he were a Resistance sympathiser!’ she snorted. ‘He was her lover. It’s a publicity stunt, this web of lies. She can’t accuse us… mon Dieu, Lucien, she slept with him!’

‘Her word against ours. And she’s respected, reputed to receive the Légion d’Honneur. No one will believe us.’ He shook his gnarled fist. ‘The Association will be ruined, a scandal… prison, your grandchildren will know…’

‘Prison? We’re old. It was wartime. You make no sense.’

‘La Rouquine suspects we killed him. She’s made him out to be a hero, she’ll accuse us.’

‘He was her lover,’ Mina said. ‘And why after all this time? She knew where to find us, to confront us.’

‘Don’t you see? She’s planned this for years. Strikes out on the offensive, as usual, to bolster the grand illusion she’s a Resistance heroine,’ Lucien said. ‘Her politician husband died, no one’s left to protect her or her lies. She figures we’d never dare accuse her since…’

Mina stared at him. ‘Tiens! A German soldier bricked up in a basement wall during wartime poses no threat to us. Let him keep mouldering.’

‘But you killed him, Mina,’ Lucien said.

Mina trembled. Why did he bring that up?

‘Or have you forgotten murdering the soldier like everything else that happened that night, Mina?’

As if she could forget.

‘But h… he attacked. It was him or me, Lucien!’

She’d tried to push it away after all these years. The real reason, the haunting past. Mina thought of their years of work supported by donations now at risk. But La Rouquine wouldn’t pursue this, she wouldn’t dare unless… something else incriminating lay in that cellar.

The telephone drilled. Lucien sat up startled. ‘The flics already! Questions…’

She had to act calm.

‘They won’t necessarily link this to us,’ Mina said. ‘Let me handle it.’

She picked up the receiver of the old black rotary dial phone, the tattooed numbers on her arm visible.

‘Resistance Association, bonjour.’ She listened. ‘A murdered Feldwebel… Sergeant?’ Mina’s wrinkled face sagged. ‘Sadly, many of our members who could provide insight have passed… concerning this memoir? Monsieur, the war spawned countless stories and rumours… I have no idea… an interview? We’re very busy… next week… call back and we’ll make an appointment.’

‘Who was that?’

‘A reporter sniffing a story,’ she said. ‘We’ll leave it alone, he’ll go away.’

‘La Rouquine won’t let it go away. You can’t bury your head in the sand now.’

Mina noticed Lucien’s stricken face. Once he’d been young, the ringleader of their Resistance youth group, and wore wooden-soled Occupation-made clogs like the rest of them. At the beginning, their meetings were innocent, Mina remembered. Politically ripe, they met with their friends after Hebrew lessons at Saturday-shut, collecting money for the Spanish Civil War, for the children in Madrid, determined to open people’s eyes. Lucien and the others came from families living in one room like hers. One bag of coal a month for heat. Always the smell of leather seeping from the factory on the heels of the cold. The one metal courtyard spigot, the only source of water for the five-storied building, carried up worn winding stairways. The toilet on the palier, in between floors, the buckets rimmed with ice on January mornings.

Now he was a frightened old man afraid of secrets. More afraid than she was.

She stared at him. ‘What aren’t you telling me, Lucien?’

‘They’ll find them.’

His tone sent a shiver up Mina’s spine.

‘Them? What do you mean?’ A quiver of unease ran through her.

‘Him. That’s what I mean, Mina. We have to check the cellar, make sure there’s no trace of him,’ he said, his thin mouth set in a determined line.

She shook her head. Her arthritis had kicked in, she was on blood pressure medication. No way would she budge.

‘You’re panicking over nothing,’ she said. ‘I need to go home, cook for my great-granddaughter’s bat mitzvah party.’

‘So you want to take the chance when La Rouquine shows up with the press…?’

‘Non… I don’t know.’

Fearful and confused, she had no answer. With a sinking feeling she knew the past had come back to haunt them. But then, had it ever gone away?

Lucien dialled a number on the phone. Mina stared out the window at the budding plane trees lining the quai. Could anyone ever get away from the past?

He slammed down the phone, interrupting her thoughts.

’Get your bag,’ he said. ‘According to the concierge’s daughter they’re doing electrical work in the cellar. It could mean they’re opening the walls.’

Mina’s shoulders twitched. She dreaded the five-minute walk she’d avoided with painstaking care all these years, the street full of memories. Now it looked like she had no choice.

Out on the quai Mina’s misgivings ballooned as they turned the corner into rue du Faubourg Saint Martin. Her hands trembled seeing the wrought-iron balconied sand-stone apartment building, like all the others except for the deeper blackened patina of soot. Next door stood the old Lévitan warehouse. Now a remodelled publicity firm but during the Occupation, the German warehouse storing looted goods from Jewish deportees’ apartments.

They stood in the now deepening twilight in front of a crowded café. On the boulevard’s pavement around them Indian men clustered in conversation, an African woman in a bright yellow headdress pushed a stroller. The new immigrants of the tenth arrondissement, but in their day it had been Russians, Poles and Lithuanians.

‘There’s people everywhere,’ she said.

‘We have to check, Mina,’ he said.

‘And if we find something, what would we do?’ She pulled his arm. ‘Let’s leave, Lucien. We’ll deny everything.’

But he hit the numbers on the digicode and the door buzzed open.

‘Ah, Monsieur Lucien, long time no see,’ said a young woman with a baby on her hip standing at the concierge’s door. ‘Maman’s shopping, desolé.’

Startled, he stepped back then recovered.

‘Ça va, Delphine,’ he said, greeting her with kisses on both cheeks. ‘Just getting things from storage. Don’t worry, I remember the way, we’ll see ourselves out.’

‘Careful on the stairs, one of the lights went out,’ she said, nodding to Mina. ‘They’re steep.’

She meant for old people like you. Mina thought.

‘Merci’

He led the way past the wirecage elevator. In the back. Mina saw the rear cobbled courtyard with green garbage containers by planter boxes of delphiniums and pots of geraniums.

Lucien opened the cellar door, leaned on his cane, took one step down.

Mina stopped. ‘But this is ridiculous! My back’s gone. I won’t go down there again. I can’t.’

‘You came this far, Mina! Don’t make it so difficult.’

Lucien clutched his cane, staring at her.

‘This feels wrong,’ Mina said.

‘It’s simple,’ said Lucien. ‘It was always the plan. We made a pact.’ He switched on the cellar light.

‘A pact… what do you mean?’ asked Mina.

Lucien ignored her. ‘Ready?’

She stood, not budging. ‘What pact?’

He leaned forward, lowered his voice. ‘Years ago our group made a pact never to reveal what a happened. Or to let anyone find the body.’

’But everyone’s gone except us.’

‘That’s why I must keep my word.’

She’d never heard about this pact… what did it mean? Dread filled her but before she could ask more he’d gone ahead. She clutched the railing as Lucien proceeded down the narrow stone stairs. Dampness and the smell of mildew and rotting wood assailed her nostrils. And it took her back to that time so long ago but still vivid today.

Sixteen years old, her hands browned with shoe polish and sore from stitching leather uppers on wooden-sole shoes – doing the piece work her parents took in to survive and put food on the table. She walked in public always anxious an official would demand her papers and discover she’d folded her jacket lapel over her yellow star.

Lucien shone the flashlight over the arched stone walls branching into tunnels under the building. Flaking stucco powdered the beaten earth floor. Electrical wires and tools were set to the side. Lining the walls were caged storage areas for each apartment, holding plastic bins, children’s bikes, chairs behind the wooden enclosures.

‘It didn’t look like this before,’ Lucien said in alarm. ‘That’s all new.’

‘When did you last come here?’ Mina asked.

‘Years ago,’ he said. ‘It’s Maman’s old storage. I rent it. They never ask questions.’ Lucien shuffled ahead. A bare electric bulb cast stark light over their faces.

‘Number 38, that’s it.’ Lucien reached under the enclosure, rooted in the dirt, pulled out a key and unlocked the padlock. He opened the door of a warped wooden shed to a musty smell.

Mina saw the cobwebbed foot-pedal sewing machine in the corner. ‘You kept that, Lucien… here?’

His father had been a skilled tailor. ‘Eh. I had no room in my place. When I came back from the camp, that’s all that was left.’ He shrugged but Mina caught the wistful look on his face. Lucien’s family had been deported and he was the only one who returned.

Lucien pushed aside boxes and shone the flashlight on the bricked-up stone wall.

‘I remembered wrong.’ Lucien shook his head. ‘See, the bricked-up part goes further all along the wall. Which part was it?’

The absurdity of the venture struck Mina. ‘Zut alors! If we can’t find it, how can any one else? Let’s go.’

He’d gone to the side of the locker, shone the beam and stepped back. ‘Mon Dieu!.

The toes of faded black leather boots stuck through a hole in the crumbling mortared brick. The blood drained from Mina’s face. She turned to run and his cane landed across her arm.

‘No you don’t,’ he said. ‘It’s too late.’ Lucien blinked in fear. ‘They’ll find him. I didn’t live all these years to be arrested for murder,’ he said, his voice now edged with steel. ‘I promised the others.’

‘You’re crazy!’

‘So Mina, you’ll let her get away with lies… again?’

‘But what can we do?’

‘We can manage part of it,’ said Lucien. ‘Call your grandson, tell him there’s old furniture and we need his help. Get him to bring his butcher’s van. But first…’

He took a pick, then handed Mina a garden hoe from the locker.

‘You expect me to use this?’ Mina asked.

Lucien spread sheets of plastic from the locker over the dirt. ‘There’s no way to cover this up, we’ve got to get him out.’

He was right.

While they worked, a slow process, footsteps rumbled from the floor above. Lucien switched on an old transistor radio, the static and bad reception drowning out the noise of the chipping and scraping. The wartime-grade mortar chipped away and crumbled. Mina knelt on the ground removing the bricks, piling them one by one. After half an hour, scraps of the wool Feldgrau soldier’s uniform showed.

Mina wiped the sweat from her brow and sniffed. A dry must-filled odour and sixty-year-old air emanated from the wall. The air of decay. Her mind went back to that night, this cavern lit by sputtering candles; they’d arranged for their Hebrew teacher to escape on a waiting canal barge and Mina had been early, the first of the group to arrive.

But instead of Lucien and their teacher, she’d found the blond, well-fed Wehrmacht soldier, the perfect Aryan. The young, handsome soldier from the warehouse next door who’d turned a blind eye to her yellow star and given her food. Not once but several times. She’d never told the others or her parents where the food came from. Or about the warm touch of his hands when he held hers. Now the soldier held a bottle in his hand, beer fumes emanated from his breath. ‘I waited for you, thought you like this,’ he said. ‘Now why does Hansi think that?’ He squinted his eyes as if in thought. ‘Hansi thinks you’re nice. A nice girl.’ He slurred his words in broken French. Drunk, he was drunk.

‘You’ve been drinking.’

‘For courage.’ A fragment of a smile shone on his handsome rosy-cheeked face. ‘My Kommandant wouldn’t like me to share this.’

She felt a wave of dizziness and looked down at her feet. Bread, cheese and slices of ham lay on a blanket on the floor. She’d only eaten a bowl of grey potatoes that day.

‘Hansi won’t tell about your friends.’

’My friends?’ She backed up, tripping on the pile of stones on the dirt floor. ‘Who told you?’

He grinned, his blue eyes glazed. ‘The redhead.’ He staggered against the wall. Young, only eighteen, two years older than her. ‘Hansi wants his girl.’

So La Rouquine informed on them, she realised d with a start, and the escape plan. And Hansi wanted La Rouquine. Now there’d be no more food. An irrational bolt of jealousy shot through her. No more of his kindness or the smile that lit up his eyes when he saw her.

She stiffened.

Waving his arm, he gestured to the food. ‘Eat. Then Hansi will teach you card game.’

’No, you have to go…’

She heard the creaking of the floorboards overhead, the cellar’s door opening. And she panicked. How could she explain this to the others, to her Hebrew teacher in hiding from the Germans?

But she knew how it would look finding her with a German soldier, taking his food. They’d accuse her of collaborating when all she’d been was hungry and keen to feel the kindness he’d shown her.

‘I think you are playing. You like Hansi.’

’I do… I mean I don’t… can’t.’

He smiled. A light lit in his eyes. ‘In the vaterland at school Hansi writes poetry. Now you inspire Hansi.’

And La Rouquine, did she inspire him, too?

‘You have to go. Now.’

Footsteps sounded on the stairs. She grabbed his hands, his warm hands, and pulled. If he didn’t leave the others would think she had betrayed their Resistance cell, sabotaged the tutor’s escape.

‘They’re coming, they can’t know… find you… please.’

He shook his blond head, folded his arms across his uniformed chest unbudging. ’Nein. Hansi stay.’

This was going horribly wrong.

‘The redhead…’

That’s when she’d found the stone and smashed his head. Stupefied, he stumbled. She’d pounded his head again and again. Until his blood pooled in a puddle in the dirt, glinting in the candlelight.

‘Watch out.’ Lucien’s pick struck with a hard thud, then the bricks crumbled in a whoosh of billowing grey dust, revealing a hollow. Inside a mummified figure in the fragments of a Wehrmacht uniform leered with brown leathered lips, the dried-up hollow eye sockets open above pinched-in cheeks. The desiccated brown-skinned hands twisted as if clutching the wall.

Mina gasped in horror. Hansi, once handsome, was now a grotesque mummy.

‘Well preserved, eh?’ Lucien said. He reached for the gold swastika signet ring on Hansi’s pinkie. He pulled, and the finger came away with his ring.

The bile rose in Mina’s stomach.

‘Help me before he disintegrates more.’

Lucien lifted and together, with effort, they pulled the corpse out. Awkward, like holding a store dummy, and quite light except for the heavy boots and mouldering wool uniform disintegrating at their touch. Hansi’s stiff hands like claws poking out. ‘See a sergeant’s stripes,’ Lucien said. He and Mina pulled the garbage bag over it. The black jackboots protruded. Before they could put another garbage bag over them footsteps sounded.

‘Lucien?’ said a voice.

His red rheumy eyes batted in terror. ‘The concierge.’

Mina pushed him forward. ‘Get her back upstairs.’

An aproned woman in support hose, clogs and hair in a bun smiled. ‘Aaah, your friend…’

Lucien walked forward, blocking her view. ‘Jeanine…’

‘Good thing you came, your other friend came looking for you,’ she said, peering over his shoulder.

‘That’s strange, I haven’t lived here in years, Jeanine. Who?’

She shook her head. ‘A bourgeois matron, well dressed, red hair. But I didn’t give your address, I told her I’d tell you first.’

Mina’s heart pounded. La Rouquine! Her pills, she’d taken her blood pressure pills at breakfast but didn’t know if her heart would hold out.

‘Jeanine, I’ll meet you upstairs,’ Lucien said, ‘and settle what I owe for the locker.’

Lucien waited until her footsteps receded. ‘She’s curious. Put him back in.’

‘And have La Rouquine find him, she’s been here already!’ said Mina. ‘We’ll fit him in the bag, take it out the courtyard door to the trash.’

‘He’s too stiff, he won’t fit.’

‘Then break his legs, Lucien,’ she said, in exasperation.

Mina turned away at the sight of Lucien leaning on the corpse’s shoulders, the brittle sounds of breaking bones. She shone the flashlight in the gaping hole. She saw what looked like old blankets and fished around with the flashlight. A black spider skittered across a man’s old-fashioned brown shoe with a raised heel. She pulled the rotting blanket apart, saw a trousered leg inside. And she screamed.

‘Shut up.’

‘Who else did you kill, Lucien?’

Lucien’s shoulders shook. And a single tear slid down his cheek. He pulled the blanket aside. Black hair drooped over a desiccated brown face, a hunched figure in brown rags.

‘But I don’t understand,’ Mina said, bewildered. ‘I helped you brick up the wall…’

‘La Rouquine said she slept with the German to save her family,’ Lucien said. ‘She lied. Never did it.’

‘What? But I thought…’

‘Everyone did. She was protecting her club-footed father, who worked next door in the Germans’ warehouse. He took deportees’ jewellery and sold it on the black market.’

Her heart thudded at the revelation. She’d got it all wrong. Mina swallowed hard. ‘You mean…’

‘You took our teacher to the canal barge and we finished bricking him up,’ Lucien interrupted. ‘But La Rouquine showed up, made excuses and beat a quick exit. Later her father came down to his locker, he saw the blood.’

‘And then?’ Mina stared at the corpse’s twisted foot.

‘Her father threatened first to turn us in to the Kommandantur, then to blackmail us.’

‘Never. He was a Jew!’

Lucien shook his head, venom in his eyes. ‘Non,only her poor mother. He had a club foot, that’s the trouble. Too easy to identify.’

‘You killed her father and bricked him up, too?’

‘Like you said, either him or us,’ he said.

Her shoulders crumpled in shame. She averted her eyes, regret filling her. But she couldn’t tell Lucien the truth.

‘Mina, you remember the Wehrmacht patrols on the street,’ Lucien said. ‘What choice did we have?’

She struggled, pulling more bricks away. ‘Hurry, before the busybody comes back.’

‘I lied to her mother, to everyone in the building.’ Lucien kicked the dirt. ‘I looked them in the face every day! And I’m still lying. Now La Rouquine’s going to find him. It’s prison!’

‘Be quiet,’ Mina said, now determined. ‘Get him in the bag, then keep the concierge busy, then it’s out in the courtyard. I’m calling my grandson.’

Lucien refused and collapsed against the wall, staring with a vacant look. She stood by the staircase and punched in her grandson’s number. Only his answering machine. Why didn’t these young ones ever answer their cell phones?

In the end Mina manoeuvred the stiff hunched figure of the father into the bag, wrapped it with duct tape. Her breathing grew laboured, coming in short gasps. The air was a miasma of dense dampness, the odour of desiccated corpses and rotting wool.

Lucien, immobile on the floor, clutched his knees, mumbling.

‘Lucien, we have to get them upstairs,’ she said, shaking his shoulders. ‘Get up, I can’t do this alone.’

His eyes batted in terror. ‘The diamonds… prison…’

Mina twisted her hands; the more the past unravelled, the worse it grew. ‘I don’t want to know.’

‘We funded the Association by selling the diamonds her father stole.’

Mina recoiled in horror. ‘All these years and you never told me,’

‘How do you think we kept the Association going?’ Lucien gave a short laugh. ‘All blood money.’

She thought of all their work, the effort. ‘But if he stole from Jews, it’s helped Jews for years.’

Lucien shook his head. ‘And I took some to open my shop.’

Shocked, she looked around. ‘Quit living in the past. It’s over. Look, we’ve got to get them out of here. Now!’

Lucien looked at her with unseeing eyes.

Mina needed to think, but with the bodies and Lucien, and the tainted air, each breath was an effort. Somehow she had to carry the man she had killed upstairs.

Back by the soldier’s corpse, Lucien was crawling and crying on the floor.

‘Help me, Lucien,’ she said, ‘get his boots.’

‘The Wehrmacht’s coming,’ Lucien said. ‘I saw them.’

Terror clutched her. He was back in the past. Gone.

‘That’s why you have to help, Lucien, or they’ll find him… right?’

He nodded, his eyes now bright, almost crazed.

‘Good, take his boots, lift, that’s right, now through the tunnel, up the stairs.’

Somehow they managed. The soldier’s brittle hands scraped the wall like he didn’t want to go, a last effort to stay. Sickened, she forced herself to mount the steps with the burden of his mummified corpse.

At the landing, Lucien peered out. The sound of a violin came from above, the cry of a child, but no one stood in the hallway.

With one hand, he opened the door to the courtyard, and the black jackboot emerged from the garbage bag, They’d forgotten to duct tape it. She shoved it back inside.

‘Hurry, Lucien,’ she said, panting.

In the shadowed courtyard, near pots of geraniums, they stuffed the soldier’s corpse into an empty garbage container. Mina emptied the contents of another bin over it.

‘One more, Lucien,’ she whispered, ‘before the Wehrmacht come. You all right?’

He waved Mina away, shuffled ahead, leaning on his cane.

Back in the cellar, the duct-taped garbage bag sat by the crumbled mortar, bricks and gaping hole. ‘Lucien, you take this bag, I’ll cover the hole.’

For a moment, Lucien looked bewildered, then a brief flash of pain crossed his face.

‘Can you manage?’

He nodded with a glazed look

‘Put it in the same place, you understand, before the…’

‘Oui, before the Wehrmacht,’ he interrupted. He pulled the bag and shuffled across the packed dirt floor.

Mina set the bricks back but it looked so obvious, any-one would be able to tell. And with the mortar gone, holes still remained. She didn’t know how long she kept working, trying to fit bricks in the empty spaces. What could she do? Frantic, she searched the locker. She found an old dresser on wheels, and straining, lugged it to cover the hole. For now it would do.

Footsteps and shouts sounded from the stairway.

‘Madame?’ the concierge said. ‘Madame, you must come now!’

Mina dragged the hoe, shovel and pickaxe back into the locker, shut the gate and put the padlock back on.

‘The medics… quelle horreur!’ The concierge appeared, nervously rubbing her hands.

‘What… what’s happened?’ Mina tried to catch her breath.

Mina’s eye caught on the brown Soldbuch fallen in the dirt. The Ausweisepapier passport-sized book that doubled as identification and pay book for German soldiers. She stepped on it before the concierge could advance further.

‘Monsieur Lucien’s had an attack,’ she said.

Horrified, she tried to cover it with her foot. ‘I’m coming.’

The concierge turned and Mina bent down to grab it. A Wehrmacht ID card with the name Hans Gruber; inside, a piece of paper. She froze, then made herself move, stuffing it inside her pocket with trembling hands.

A medic leaned over Lucien, who lay sprawled on the tiles with an oxygen mask over his pale face. Another medic’s crossed hands pumped Lucien’s chest in measured thrusts.

‘Heart attack, 85 rue du Faubourg Saint Martin,’ he said, into the microphone clipped on his collar. ‘Send a second team.’

A woman with her hair in curlers stood watching on the staircase. Mina’s mind snapped back into gear. She saw the garbage bag beyond Lucien’s body.

‘Lucien did too much, I told him,’ the concierge said. ‘I said I’ll carry the garbage out. But,’ she tugged Mina’s sleeve and stared at her, ‘he said the Germans were coming. He’s gone a little funny, non?’

Mina said nothing, her feet rooted to the floor.

‘I knew his mother, she never came back from the camp,’ the concierge said, tugging Mina’s sleeve harder, ‘but I heard things when I took over. They hid Jews down there.’

Static erupted from the medic’s microphone. ‘We’re out front, give us a status report.’

‘No response,’ said the medic.

Mina put her hand to her mouth. The medic thrust harder but Lucien’s eyes had rolled up into his head.

‘Make way, s’il vous plaît.’’ Stretcher bearers bumped the wall in the narrow hall.

‘Too late.’ The medic shook his head. The other medic stood and picked up Lucien’s cane.

‘Lucien?’ Mina said. But he’d gone.

She choked back a sob. Her eyes settled on the garbage bag. Now it rested on her. The medic looked around. ‘His possessions, Madame?’

The concierge shook her head.

‘Non, the poor man was taking things to the garbage. Let me take that, Monsieur.’

Mina stepped forward in alarm. Lucien’s white face gleamed in the ball light. The medic stood blocking the courtyard door.

‘Non, I’ll do it,’ she said.

‘But Lucien said…’

Mina ignored her, grabbed the bag and, praying the concierge wouldn’t stop her, dragged it past them. She had to get the bag out of here. In the courtyard, she paused, looked around to make sure they weren’t watching, then heaved the bag. But she couldn’t lift it high enough to reach into the bin. Exhausted, she leaned against the wall. Took deep breaths until the pounding pressure in her brain stopped. Lucien… she couldn’t think about that now.

She hefted the bag again with all her strength, heard the crackling of brittle bones, and this time it landed in the bin. From inside came the squealing of rats disturbed by the noise.

Now she’d taken care of the proof. But she couldn’t rest. Back in the hallway, she made herself walk past Lucien who was being lifted onto the stretcher. Past the curious look of the concierge.

Out on the street, yellow sodium streetlights shone on bystanders. Were they watching her? She kept going, trying to ignore the catch in her heart, that racing of her blood. The doctor warned her if that happened she had to stop and rest. Stop whatever she was doing. But she couldn’t stop. Not just yet. A few more steps and she’d reach the bus stop.

Her pulse slower now, she scanned the street. Just ahead on her left the Number 47 bus approached the stop. She’d take the bus, get away. Keep the secrets. She took another step.

The bus driver never saw the old woman stumbling in the darkness into the street. His bus jolted at the thud and he heard the scream. He braked to a halt and jumped out.

‘Madame, I didn’t see you,’ he said, kneeling by the old woman. ‘Mon Dieu… speak.’

Mina tried to open her mouth. Little white lights danced in front of her and she saw it all so clearly now. The Feldgrau uniform and the diamonds scattered in the blood they hadn’t bothered to hide. She clutched her pocket and the little lights faded.

Passers-by paused on the pavement. Someone pointed. A flic, one of the passers-by, stopped and ran towards the old woman sprawled on the cobbled street. The flic knelt down and saw the woman’s twisted broken neck. He felt for her pulse. Nothing. Clutched in her hand was an odd brown book. On the opened page he saw faded old-fashioned German script – Hans Gruber, Blut-Gruppe O, Feldwehel, and a sepia photo of a young man stamped over with an eagle clutching a wreath surrounding a swastika. And creased in the fold a yellowed paper with what looked like a German poem and the words Mina je t’aime.