GAUL
TARASCO
JULY AD 344
Arinius stood with his brother-in-law, watching another sunrise over the Vallée des Trois Loups. Each day the soldiers did not come was a reprieve, though he knew the waiting was making the others careless. They were starting to take the threat less seriously.
The Tarascae had taken it in turns to keep watch through the short summer nights. Only a few hours of darkness between dusk and dawn. Each was armed. Those who had fought, either in the service of the Roman army, or to defend their land, held swords or javelins, slings. Many were armed with clubs, knives, their weapons the spoils of war, skirmishes and ambushes, rather than campaigns or battles. Most of the villagers were guerrilla fighters, using the woods and the forests, untrained in the art of fighting but with a raw belligerence suited well to these lawless border lands.
Arinius had a heavy rectangular shield. His old hunting knife was in his right hand, though he prayed he would not be called upon to use it. He was prepared to fight to the death to protect his friends, their community, but he did not wish to take the life of another.
He knew he was being naïve – and that Lupa, had she been there, would have laughed at his moral distinction. She, more than him, was able to reconcile God’s commandments with the cruelties of the world in which they lived. For him, though, the gentleness of the gospels, the words of John and Luke sang more truly. His God was a God of light and redemption, not of vengeance and judgement.
He did not wish to kill another human being. Only God, he believed, had that right. And he had seen too much death in his youth, saw how it corrupted and despoiled all that was best in human nature, left a scar on the soul.
‘A false alarm, do you think, peyre?’ one of the young men asked him.
He had tried so many times to make them address him by his name, feeling dishonest and humbled to be singled out and ranked above his station. And ‘peyre’ was a strange, local word, a hybrid, neither Latin nor any other language Arinius had come across. But they insisted and he had given up trying to stop them.
‘Could it be a false alarm?’
Arinius wanted to give them hope. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I do not think so.’
He could feel the twist and shift of evil in the air, a malignancy like a physical presence stalking them, coming closer.
‘No, they are coming,’ he said. ‘Maybe not tonight, maybe not tomorrow, but they are close at hand. Soon they will be here.’ He caught his breath. ‘May God deliver us.’
CARCASSONNE
JULY 1944
‘But with respect, sir,’ Laval said, ‘why not arrest them now? Marianne and Sandrine Vidal still live there. Another woman is always there, tall with cropped hair.’
‘What did Fournier’s sister actually tell you?’ Authié demanded.
‘That they are discreet, careful to observe the blackout. Sometimes they are out late. Past the curfew.’
Authié had drunk more than he’d intended with Schiffner, then spent the rest of the night going through the surveillance files. It was now five o’clock and he had a headache, but he wasn’t ready to call it a night. Laval had spent the past two hours gathering information about interrogations and arrests – firstly, in the past week, then, the past fortnight – going backwards and forwards between the Commissariat and the Feldgendarmerie. Much of it was classified and, although Laval had requested the records, they would not be made available until the morning. But Authié had read enough to have a clear picture of the state of affairs in Carcassonne.
There was a great deal of circumstantial evidence, though no proof, that all three women were involved in partisan activity. Suzanne Peyre, whom Authié remembered, had been taken in on Monday, but released without charge. Authié intended to institute several such raids today. It didn’t matter who they arrested or why, only that the population should be aware that there was a new regime in place.
‘What about Pelletier? Did she mention seeing him at all?’
‘Madame Fournier said she hadn’t seen a man answering Pelletier’s description,’ Laval admitted. ‘It doesn’t mean he’s not there.’
‘Have you tried the Quai Riquet?’
‘Not yet, sir.’
‘Well do it,’ he snapped. He rubbed his hand across his forehead. The headache was getting worse.
‘Sir,’ Laval said cautiously, ‘I think we should act now. Raid the house. Arrest everyone there.’
Authié opened his eyes and stared at his lieutenant. For a moment, he wondered if he was right. If it would be better to strike while everyone was asleep. It was only instinct telling him that Sandrine Vidal had anything to do with the device the guards had discovered in the Tour de la Justice – it could have been put there by any partisan group – but since reading the police reports in Toulouse, he had been unable to shake the idea that Sandrine Vidal and ‘Sophie’ were the same person. And nothing he had read in the surveillance files in the past few hours had caused him to change his mind. If he was right, then even more reason to bide his time.
De l’Oradore had ordered him to find and interrogate Audric Baillard. Sandrine Vidal might be his best chance of finding the historian.
‘Two birds with one stone,’ he repeated to himself.
Authié met Laval’s gaze, his moment of indecision over. ‘No, we are going to wait. Wait to see what happens in the Cité tonight. See if they – anyone – act. Otherwise, we shall be waiting for them tomorrow.’
He could see from his expression that Laval thought he was wrong.
‘But surely . . .’
‘I don’t want to run the risk of the terrorists calling off their attempt in the Cité.’
‘Why would they?’ asked Laval.
‘Rumours will be spreading that something is planned. Both our side and theirs will be aware of the dinner. I want to give the insurgents something else to think about. Draw their attention to the Bastide and away from the Cité.’
‘Very good, sir,’ Laval said, though it was clear he didn’t understand what Authié was trying to do.
Authié waved his hand. ‘Get some sleep, Laval. Check on Madame Pelletier first thing, go back to the Vidal house, then report back. I have set in train a series of raids for tomorrow afternoon. I want the insurgents to believe that those arrests are our main priority.’
Laval saluted, then walked quickly across the room and out into the corridor. The sound of the door slamming ricocheted through Authié’s head. He opened his desk drawer and hunted around for an aspirin. It was his own desk, and he had already hung his maps back on the wall. Schiffner had provided space for him in the Feldgendarmerie, rather than Gestapo premises. It was an odd sensation to be back in the same white building, one floor higher up. As if nothing had changed.
He closed the drawer. There were no aspirin.
Raoul came out of the club and stood on the street. The light was just beginning to turn from a deep blue to the pale white of early morning. His euphoria at their successful operation last night, in setting the bomb and getting away unobserved, had drained away. Now he was left with a vague, anxious feeling in his stomach. He pushed his hands deep into his pockets, breathing in the warm night air. He didn’t know what time it was, but it felt nearer to morning than to night.
He wished he hadn’t drunk so much. But Robert had kept filling his glass while they waited for Yvette to arrive. Raoul needed to think but his brain was sluggish. All he wanted was to get back to Sandrine and sleep. Sleep and never wake up. He was too tired to think. But something Yvette had said had set off a ripple of alarm in his head. What was it? Why couldn’t he think straight?
He headed towards the Canal du Midi, down the shabby side street and on to the towpath. For an instant, he looked across the still water towards the Quai Riquet to see if there was a light burning in his mother’s window. He had visited once or twice, but his presence so frightened her – she seemed to think he was a ghost – that he’d given up. Kinder to stay away, though he felt shabby about it.
The window was dark.
He made himself run through yet again what Yvette had said. A telephone call had been received at Gestapo headquarters as she came on shift. Plans for the dinner tomorrow night. Schiffner and his deputies were angry. Someone was coming from Toulouse, but arrived earlier than expected. She hadn’t been able to work out if the visitor was German or French, but arrangements were disrupted because of it.
Then what?
Raoul felt his chest tighten. Something was eating away at him, something that struck a wrong note. He kicked a stone into the water. It fell into the canal with a dead splash. He hesitated, a glimmer of a thought piercing his consciousness, but he couldn’t get hold of it.
He tried to imagine the scene. The visitor arrives and goes into Schiffner’s office. Yvette hears raised voices, but then the telephone rings again and the mood changes. She hears laughing and a trail of cigar smoke comes from under the door. The door opens and the visitor’s talking about his girlfriend, or his wife, Yvette can’t tell. Pretty name, though. All disjointed, fragments overheard as the door closes again.
Raoul frowned. Yvette said so much, it was hard to work out what mattered and what didn’t. He stopped, took his cigarette packet from his pocket and saw he was down to his last two.
Laughing in Schiffner’s office, talking about tomorrow. No one much about. Raoul stopped dead, a trickle of realisation finally penetrating his sleep-starved mind. Was that all that was niggling at him? That there should have been more going on? That the Gestapo should be on full alert for Authié’s arrival? Why wasn’t Schiffner in the Cité himself, ensuring the finishing touches were in place? It was an obvious target for an assassination attempt.
Raoul struck a match. Was it possible the visitor from Toulouse was actually Authié? That he had arrived a day early? And that second telephone call, when, as Yvette put it, the mood changed? From the garrison in the Cité? No reason to think so, but yet, now the thought was in his mind, Raoul couldn’t shake it. Because if the bomb had been found, then of course Schiffner didn’t need to be in the Cité. He already knew what was planned. He just had to sit tight and wait for them to put their plan into action. Schiffner and Authié, laughing and smoking and drinking. Sociable, she’d said.
Finally, he realised. Remembered the one word that had stuck like a splinter under his skin and had been festering there all this time. Yvette’s cheerful voice in his head, rattling on and on.
‘Such a pretty name. If I’d had a daughter, I’d have called her that. Too late now, I suppose.’
‘Sophie,’ said Raoul.
Yvette had said the visitor’s girlfriend was called Sophie. Except he wasn’t talking about his girlfriend.
Raoul began to run, away from the Quai Riquet, across the boulevard Antoine Marty, doubling back towards the rue du Palais just as the birds began to sing.