‘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…’