Blood Game, page 31
“Micheleine Robillard?” he asked one man, who shook his head, then another, aware that this tight-knit group might not tell him anything, even if they knew. Discretion, silence, often meant the difference between life or death.
“Why do you ask?” a young man replied.
He was lean and handsome with the sort of looks he supposed a woman would be drawn to, and the smile would pull them in.
“She's a friend.” He finally settled on the word, because she had been that, even briefly, and more.
“I was wondering if you knew her, possibly could tell me if you've seen her.”
The young man smiled, pushing his cap back. It was the sort of smile that might mean anything.
“Jehanne; I know her.”
“Is she well?” he asked with sudden hope.
He nodded. “The last time I saw her.” The young man's eyes widened. “The woman is fearless,” and made a slicing gesture across this throat. “I would not want her for an enemy.”
“Where? Can you tell me where you saw her?” Paul demanded.
There was a gesture that could only mean one thing. Paul pulled the pack of cigarettes from the front of his jacket and offered him one.
“How long ago?” he asked, the flame of the match flaring at the tip of the cigarette.
A stream of smoke filled the air. The young man smiled. “I am Phillipe. You will remember, yes?”
“Yes, of course.”
If he didn't wipe that grin off his face, Paul was going to wipe it off for him.
“How long ago did you see her?”
“Several days.” That shrug again. “A few weeks. It's difficult to remember.”
Paul grabbed him by the front of his coat.
“Was it several days, or a few weeks?”
The cigarette dangled from Phillipe's lips.
“Three weeks.”
“Where?”
“North.”
That told him very little. They were all north of somewhere.
“Eh! What is this? Phillipe?”
A large man appeared, a thick, bushy beard covering half his face, equally bushy brows over his eyes like feelers on a giant bug.
“This one was asking about Jehanne,” Phillipe replied as he adjusted his coat and cap.
“Eh? How do you know Jehanne?” the taller man demanded.
“We're friends. I was hoping for some word about her, where she might be.”
A long stare, the flat expression.
“She is gone,” the man finally replied, and then motioned to the one called Phillipe.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVE
DECEMBER 4, 1944
It was coming soon.
They'd been hearing about it for weeks—an Allied offensive to push the Germans out of France and back to Germany. But the bloody weather had stalled everyone off, with storm after storm and mud that bogged down both man and machine. And then there were the fuel shortages. But here in Arras, at the edge of the offensive, the calendar meant the Christmas holiday was close, with a new year right behind it. And hope.
Paul Bennett caught a ride on an armored troop vehicle from their base camp into the city now occupied by Allied forces. The vehicle slipped around a corner, passing boarded-up businesses. But lights glowed near the city center and farther out across the city, in spite of the mandatory blackout.
He'd heard that several of the high command were there in the city hall. Others were encamped in other buildings against the latest storm, while a perimeter had been set up with heavily armed guards controlling traffic in and out of the city.
He'd entered the city earlier with Dunnett. Command wanted photographs for those back home on the evening dispatch, a political move that showed the progress that was being made with war-weary people back in London. Nothing that revealed their location; all photographs were carefully screened before they were let out to the press. But the sort of photographs that showed locals welcoming the Allied forces—happy faces, grateful wives, and children waving—with other photographs of burned-out buildings, carefully screened to match headlines:
“This is what we're fighting for! The liberation of France...the liberation of Europe!”
Arras had been liberated in September, but the signs of German occupation were everywhere. They passed more buildings, windows blackened, military vehicles sweeping through the rain-slickened streets from the latest storm that had blown in from the channel. Then the spires of the Cathedral of Notre Dame appeared through the swirling rain.
“Just here,” he told the driver, then swung down as the driver made a rolling stop, then down-shifted and waved him off. He pulled up the collar of his field jacket and climbed the steps to the entrance of the cathedral.
A sign board near the entrance gave the hours of Sunday services. In the center of Arras, with the war all around them, occupied by yet another foreign army, the people of France went about their lives.
It was quiet inside the cathedral, several candles on the high altar. The war seemed far away, beyond those ancient medieval walls with Gothic vaults looming in the shadows. It was here he hoped to learn something about Micheleine's family, something Nico had mentioned the last time Paul saw him.
“She never spoke of her family, you see,” the young man told him. “To protect them, I think. But more than once, I heard her ask about Arras, in the north.”
Arras. At the center of two world wars. A medieval city that had withstood bombing, invasion, and occupation. Yet it survived.
How long it had been since he had been in a church, the quiet stillness of it wrapping around him, reminding him of Sunday mass as a child, the certainty of faith a constant in his life, the world beyond far away. And then the typical questions of youth—was it real? The stories, the teachings, the absolute faith in a world that seemed to rapidly spin out of control, the rumored atrocities, foreign-sounding names and places.
He'd wandered, to London, university, then the war exploded at their doorstep, and he took his photographs. He left the university. Between assignments he drove ambulance, while the world exploded at their doorstep. Raised on it, he attended mass only sporadically, then not at all.
Did God exist is a world that seemed determined to destroy itself?
“There is no service this evening.”
He spun around, instincts sharpened over the past months, his hands closed over his rifle. The priest held his hands up.
“We have little of value, my son. The Germans have seen to that.”
Paul shook his head, hands relaxing. “Forgive me, Father, I meant no disrespect.”
“We live in uncertain times,” the priest smiled gently. “You are welcome of course. Please, come. Stay for a while.” He indicated the rows of pews in the main chapel.
“The church is always open.” He walked with him, his cassock frayed at the edges but immaculate.
“It has been a while since you were in a church,” he speculated.
“A while.”
“Your accent,” the priest speculated. “Not English. Scottish perhaps?”
Paul nodded. “My mother is Scottish. My father was English.”
“Ah, and family?”
“My mother and sister are in the north.”
“They are safe, then?”
“Yes, far from the cities.”
“And you are far from your faith?”
“It has been a while.”
There in the chapel, he felt the pull, that deeply ingrained sense of awe as a child that had wavered as he became an adult.
“God is always here, waiting, patient, and now you have found your way here.”
“I'm looking for someone,” he began. He realized how that sounded. Millions of people had been displaced across the whole of Europe. If rumors were true, hundreds of thousands had simply disappeared, loaded onto trains that disappeared—men, women, children, whole families. And he was looking for someone.
“Her family may be in Arras. I had hoped there might be some records here at the church; the city hall has few records.”
He'd been there the day before and learned the German occupation army had destroyed all official records—records of births, marriages, deaths, as if the people whose names were on those records and documents never existed.
“I know the Church keeps records of its parishioners. I was hoping you might be able to find them. Robillard was her family name.”
The priest shook his head. “Sadly, I cannot help you. When the Germans came, they destroyed the records in the cathedral—hundreds of years of history, the names of families, records of births, deaths, everything. As if they could wipe out the past of the church. The few things that have survived were books and some of the older archives that are centuries old that we were able to hide from them. Everything else was lost. They burned everything they found.” He shook his head sadly.
“Do you remember the family?” Paul asked. “Husband, wife, two sons, and three daughters. One of the daughters was named Micheleine. She would have been fifteen when the war started. Her father and brother were with the Resistance. They were killed.”
Again, the priest shook his head. “Robillard is not an unusual name. There are parish churches beyond the city, in the smaller towns and villages. Perhaps they belonged to one of them.” He laid a hand on Paul's shoulder.
“I will ask about the family. Someone may know of them.” He started to ask where he could contact him, then stopped.
“But you will be moving on when the weather clears.”
“I'll come back.”
Paul took out a pencil and tore a piece of paper from the notepad he carried to keep a log of the photographs he took. He wrote down his name and the address of the newspaper in London.
“If you should hear of them, please send a letter to this address.” If they were still alive. He handed the paper to the priest, then turned to leave.
“Stay for a while,” the priest told him. “The storm has not yet passed. It is dry inside, and you are welcome. God does not require that you pray. He asks only that you are here.”
How long had it been since he had been in a church? Four years? Longer?
In London, with the bombs and the city burning around them, there were times when the only thing that mattered was survival. There had been no time for church. There had only been the warning sirens, and the mad dash for one of the underground shelters.
There, once, with the bombs raining down overhead, the explosions felt through the stone walls and underfoot, a deacon and several parishioners had also sought shelter. There in the smothering darkness his voice reached out through the fear and uncertainty.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil for though art with me...”
The 23rd Psalm, and a voice in the wilderness of death and destruction.
He had walked away then, just as he walked away now, unable to reconcile the death and destruction he'd seen, in London and on those beaches months earlier, and in villages and towns since.
“I will pray for you,” he heard the priest say as he left the chapel.
He caught a ride back to the apartment over a market where he and Dunnett had been encamped the past several days. It was one of the few buildings the Germans hadn't occupied. It was small and the water service was often non-existent, but it was dry and near the city center where the high command was housed. The owner of the market had only the barest of canned supplies on the shelves, but had greeted them with much enthusiasm.
“Take my photograph,” he said in heavily accented English when they arrived and he saw Paul's camera.
“So the world will know that we are at last liberated.”
Dunnett had just returned from a meeting of the handful of fellow correspondents who made up the press corps.
A cigarette hung from his mouth as he pulled his latest dispatch from the typewriter and stuffed it inside the leather portfolio.
“What is it?” Paul Bennett asked, eyeing the open duffel bag on the narrow cot behind Dunnett.
“We're moving out, part of the forward advance.” There was an excitement in Dunnett's voice—the hound on the scent of prey; in this case the prey was the next story to be written.
“We have to report to base camp in thirty minutes. A driver will pick us up. But I need to get this over to communications to make the next flight out to London.”
Thirty minutes. There wasn't enough time to get back to the cathedral and leave a message if Micheleine's family should be found.
Dunnett returned just as the driver was pulling up to the front of the market. His typewriter had already been packed into the case. He tossed his duffle bag into the back of the Morris military vehicle.
“That was good timing,” he commented, as Paul crawled into the cab of the Morris beside him.
“Did you find the person you were looking for?”
Paul shook his head.
“Too bad, that,” Dunnett commented. “Now it appears we're off on the final push against the Germans. No telling when we might get back this way.”
Paul glanced back over his shoulder at the spires of the cathedral reaching into the skyline as the Morris sped through the rain-slicked streets, swerving around other vehicles, toward the edge of the city.
If any of them made it back alive.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SIX
PRESENT DAY
Acentury earlier Arras stood at the edge of the western front during World War I, and was reduced to little more than rubble. The infamous trenches became death traps for many and could still be seen a hundred years later, some filled in with sign posts to mark their location, others grown over in that way that nature reclaimed what was abandoned after the smoke of battle cleared.
In some remote locations, the barbed wire that had marked the narrow fields of battle that were all that separated Allied and German forces, and where so many had died, could still be found—rusted, broken in places, a reminder.
The war to end all wars.
Then in World War II, Arras had been occupied by the German army as part of the occupation forces determined to take France, eventually liberated by the British weeks before the Allied push against the Germans.
The scars remained. Buildings that had been razed either by bombing or fire in the first war had been rebuilt on the shell of centuries-old foundations, faint lines of newer construction seen in the stones and bricks on the walls of Flemish Baroque buildings in the town center.
The original Cathedral of Notre Dame had been built somewhere between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. Once the most beautiful cathedral in northern France, it had been destroyed during the French Revolution, rebuilt, then destroyed again by shelling during World War I.
After the war it was rebuilt in that previous Gothic design, and rose majestically into the skyline as they drove past the town square.
“Where?” James asked.
A single word, the first he'd spoken after the drive north in silence, anger between them like a wall. He didn't agree with her decision to continue, but he didn't try to talk her out of it again.
Where to search? Where to begin? Where to find records of a young woman who had once lived there and then gone off to fight the Germans in World War II?
The manager of the tourist office directed them to the public library.
“They have many books about the war,” he explained.
The library was one of the few buildings that had survived the war, a massive complex of baroque colonnaded buildings that had been updated through the years with new technology. There were reading rooms, computer kiosks, and political banners on the walls, along with life-sized photographs of famous authors of the twentieth century—Jean Paul Sartre, Camus, and Georges Simenon, juxtaposed with photographs of young twenty-first century authors.
She gave the young clerk at the main desk her business card and explained that she was interested in information about local history during World War II.
He provided directions to an area of the library with an extensive collection of books and periodicals about both world wars including an extensive computer archive.
Kris felt like they were starting over, searching for a needle in a haystack, one file after another, pages of information that only went back to the years after the war, other information that pre-dated the war. James sat across from her in front of another monitor, scrolling through archives of daily newspapers from the same period.
It was time-consuming, complicated by the language barrier. Hours later, she rubbed the headache that had begun from staring at the computer screen. Another file, and more documents. Then, an entry caught her attention. It was a reference to a newspaper announcement, from May 18, 1954.
“Where can I find this?” she asked the young student clerk at the desk in the department, and showed her the reference number she'd written down.
“That is a micro-filmed document,” the young woman explained. “Older documents that were archived many years ago. We have a microfilm reader over here.”
It had been years since she'd used a microfilm reader at Columbia, studying ancient texts that had been recorded on microfilm before computers, a system rarely used any longer with libraries updated with scanned and cross-referenced information capable of being accessed by hundreds of users at the touch of a computer screen.
She leaned over James' shoulder as he scrolled through dozens of archived newspaper pages from May 1954, then slowed on the 18th.
“There.” She pointed to the entry that came up. It was typewritten in French, a marriage announcement. One of the names leapt off the screen at her—Angeline Robillard.
1954. Almost ten years after the war. Was it possible they had found a member of Micheleine's family?
From what she already knew, Micheleine's father and two older brothers had died during the war, leaving behind her mother and a younger sister. If she was alive, her younger sister could have been in her early twenties in 1954.
“What about the other name—Marchand?”
