“We’re not going to hurt you, stop struggling,” Jaeger said.
“You’ll get me in trouble.” The youngster spoke in French. “My mother expects me home for supper.”
“Do you have a father or brothers?”
“No, sir, just my mother.”
The boy’s face was pinched with the cold, his cheeks chapped and raw, but he didn’t seem frightened; there was a lively curiosity in his bright eyes as he stared up at the huge tank.
“Do you know who we are?” Jaeger asked him.
“Yes. You’re Germans.”
“What’s your name?”
“It’s Simon Coutreau, sir.”
Jaeger wondered if it had been only his own nerves that had alerted him. No, there was the business of the snares and the darkness...
He took the briar pipe from his pocket and put it between his teeth. He smiled at the boy and said, “Are you afraid of us, Simon?”
The boy shook his head. “I’ve done nothing to be afraid of, sir.”
“Did someone tell you to watch for us? You might as well tell us the truth.”
“No, I came to the woods to set snares. I come every day. There are rabbits here.”
“You must be a fine hunter, Simon, to find their tracks in the dark.”
“But it was light when I started, sir. I’m on my way home now.”
“Yet you’ve set no snares.”
“Because I found no tracks, sir.”
Jaeger looked at the road ahead, the snow shining in the light of his blackout beams, and then studied the white fields and dark woods on either side of him.
“Let him go, Sergeant Trakl,” he said.
“Let him go, sir? He might be lying.”
“You heard me, sergeant. We’re not at war with children.”
The boy ran off toward the woods, and Jaeger turned his command car back onto the road to Lepont.
Chapter Eighteen
December 21, 1944. Lepont-sur-Salm. Thursday, 1700 Hours.
When the knock sounded, Denise Francoeur hastily collected the picture books from the floor and gave them to the child, who held them tightly as the schoolteacher pulled back the partition concealing the cellar stairway.
When Margret had disappeared into the dusk of the cellar, Denise smoothed her skirt and opened the front door to a tall American soldier whose face was shadowed by his helmet.
“Sorry to disturb you,” he said. “My name is Docker, Sergeant Docker.”
“Can I help you?”
“Monsieur Bonnard told us you buried a German paratrooper a couple of nights ago and that you have his ID.” She looked puzzled. “His papers. I’d like to see them. I can speak some French if it would help.”
“No, please come in. My English is quite well.” She closed the door quickly against the winds. “Only... it’s rusty, there was no one to...” She paused again. “... to practice with for some time.”
“I’m sure your German is better,” he said.
Her sense of irony and other subtleties had been blunted by five years of war; she did not know whether the American was being rude or simply stating a fact. He noticed her reaction and said, “Bonnard told me you were the schoolteacher so I assumed you’d know languages.”
“I’ll get the papers,” she said. “He also had a gun. Would you want that, too?”
“Yes,” Docker said, glancing at the worn rug with its design of vines and peacocks, at straight-backed chairs near the fireplace, a sewing basket on the floor with a darning egg resting on a frayed blouse.
One wall had been constructed oddly, he thought, in three jointed sections, the middle one decorated with a carved and brightly painted angel’s head.
A small log fire burned in the grate. On the mantelpiece stood a cut-glass bowl heaped with pinecones. Docker looked at himself in a clouded mirror above the mantel, surprised at the gray in his temples, silver now in the candlelight, and surprised too by the lines of weary tension in his features. He was listening to artillery fire from the direction of St. Vith when she came back with a wallet and a bolstered handgun, which she gave to him.
“Would you like some coffee? We make it from roasted barley but it’s hot.”
“Don’t go to any trouble.”
“No, it’s on the stove.”
In the dining room adjoining the parlor, Docker sat at a pine table, bare except for ajar holding dry oak leaves.
The gun was a .25-caliber automatic with ivory hand-grips and small diamond-shaped decorations framing black swastikas. There was a round of ammunition in the chamber and seven more in the cartridge clip. Docker ejected the bullet and put the gun on safe. Papers from the cracked black leather wallet gave him the name and rank and age of the dead German paratrooper: Willi Bremer, Feldwebel, twenty-three. There were several pictures of girls, a pay book, a scapular medal in tissue paper and newspaper clippings of soccer matches in the Stadtswald in Frankfurt am Main. None of these fragments told Docker what he had hoped to find out, which was whether the dead German in a GI uniform had been part of a strike force infiltrating the area or simply a lone flier who happened to bail out of a damaged aircraft above Mont Reynard.
“We took these from his uniform.” She handed him a pair of lapel insignia shaped like tiny silver lightning bolts, the jagged SS of the Schutzstaffel.
“Is his the only body you’ve found? Or that you’ve heard about?”
“The only one, sergeant.”
“Are there any strangers in the village, people you don’t know or haven’t seen before?”
“No.”
Docker fingered the silver SS runes and watched the candlelight glinting on them.
“I’ll get the coffee,” she said.
Docker put his canteen and cigarettes on the table, watching her as she poured coffee into pewter mugs. She was thin and pale with long black hair held back at her temples with tortoiseshell combs. When she brought him coffee, he put a splash of whiskey in it.
“Would you like some? It’s homemade but not bad.”
She nodded and Docker added whiskey to her mug. She looked at the backs of her hands and moved her fingertips slowly over the planks of the old table.
“Did Monsieur Bonnard tell you about my brother?”
“Only that he’d been shot, ma’am, with other hostages.”
“I’d like to tell you something else about him.” She pushed a strand of hair from her forehead and looked about her, a puzzled frown on her face, as if for a moment she’d forgot where she was. “When you call me ‘ma’am,’ it makes me feel quite formal, like I’m in the classroom. I’m twenty-six. You may call me Denise, if you wish. I haven’t talked to anyone for such a long time. My husband was taken almost four years ago and since the hostages were shot, there’s not even my brother.”
“What did you want to tell me about him?”
“Everything,” she said... “How he let me watch him shave when I was young. How we sang together at the holidays— No, I don’t mean that. I wanted to tell you that the Germans shot them right here, in the square in front of the church, you can see where the bullets broke the stones below the little statue of the Virgin... Did Bonnard tell you my brother had a daughter?”
“He said your brother married a Jewish girl and they had a daughter named Margret,” Docker said, and sipped the coffee, bitter with Trankic’s whiskey.
“My brother, Edmond, got Margret out of Cologne after Crystal Night. He crossed the border through the forest. When he was able to return, his wife and her family were gone. They had been taken away. Edmond left Margret with relatives in Verviers, a large family where she could go unnoticed.”
Docker lit a cigarette and watched the smoke in the candlelight. “And is that what you wanted to tell me, ma’am?”