Chapter 34
THIRTY-FOUR
MARGOT
The shouts and the hurrying footsteps went on ringing in the tunnels, and Margot felt as if she was being crushed in a vice.
‘Take Isabelle upstairs to your rooms,’ she told Theo.
Her thoughts were rushing like a river as she tried to think of a plan and soothe the little girl.
‘With any luck, they won’t bother going all the way up – they’ve got a lot of books to search through.
And if they do, it’ll be fine – they won’t poke around in your flat, seeing as they’re commanded by your brother. And we’ll pretend we’ve just woken up.’
The Professor nodded. Then he reached into his pocket and took out a folded piece of sheet music.
‘If they take me, leave this on the piano in Petit’s,’ he told her. ‘That’s all you need to do. It’s for Isabelle’s father; for France.’
Margot nodded as she took the folded paper and put it into her pocket. As she glanced down, she saw blood: Theo’s trousers were torn over his shin, and the fabric was bloodied.
‘You’ve been injured!’ she whispered urgently. She jogged Isabelle in her basket, hoping she’d stay calm even though her little face was threatening to pucker into a cry again. The noises echoing through the tunnels were getting closer and closer. ‘Did they shoot you?’
Theo glanced down, as though he hadn’t noticed. Then he shook his head.
‘A bullet grazed me,’ he said. Then he took the Moses basket, and this time Isabelle seemed content to be handed over. ‘It’s nothing. I think they got some of— I was lucky to get away this time.’
‘A bullet’s not nothing!’ Margot was shocked, and she wondered who else had been hit. ‘Did they recognise you?’
‘They didn’t see me,’ Theo assured her. ‘I was just a person in the darkness, running for his life.’
‘I’ll bandage you up, don’t worry,’ Margot said. ‘And just be careful, Isabelle might start crying again.’
They climbed the stairs in the light from Margot’s lamp. She brushed Isabelle’s cheek to say goodbye as Theo turned to climb the last flight up to his rooms. It was so hard to part with the baby, even for what she hoped would only be a few minutes.
She dived into her flat, leaving the door open so that she could hear when the SS arrived.
She kicked off her shoes and peeled off her stockings, replacing them with her worn slippers.
Then she grabbed her quilted satin dressing gown from the hook behind her bedroom door and flung it over her clothes.
She pulled back the blankets and punched the pillows, then ran her hands through her hair to disorder it as thought she’d been woken up.
She was buttoning up her dressing gown as she heard banging echo up from the cellar: the SS were trying to get through the door.
Margot hurried back down to the cellar and heard another gunshot in the distance and more shouting. She whispered prayers under her breath, hoping like mad that her friends had got to the cellar under Petit’s in time.
The last thing she wanted to do was to invite monsters into her bookshop, her home, and put Theo and Isabelle at risk. But she had no choice, if she didn’t want them to smash the door down.
‘Just a moment!’ she called. Her hands were shaking as she drew back the bolt and opened the door.
There were two black-clad SS soldiers behind the door. They were young men, younger than Margot, and they greeted her with the curt nod that had become so common since the Nazis had come to Cordeval.
‘Forgive the intrusion, madame,’ said one of the young men, his words clipped and polite. ‘We’ve discovered terrorists using these tunnels. For the safety of all residents, we’re searching the village in case any of the criminals have managed to hide themselves.’
‘Of course,’ Margot said, pretending to stifle a yawn. ‘But my cellar door was bolted, I don’t think they could have got in here.’
She held up her lantern so that it cast its circle of light around the cellar.
Some of the chairs were stacked, others were pushed against the wall.
The crates and boxes that hadn’t contained anything on the Liste Otto looked untidy now, after the book club had hurriedly taken the others.
She hoped it wouldn’t look suspicious. And there was nowhere for someone to hide.
‘Unless they bolted it,’ he commented, then put one foot over the threshold. There was no closing the door now, Margot knew, not against that polished jackboot. ‘We won’t be more than a few minutes.’
Margot reluctantly stood back and let them walk into her home. The sounds echoing through the tunnels made her heart grip with terror. People she’d known all her life in Cordeval could be crying out for help, but she could do nothing except stand there in her slippers, holding a lamp for Nazis.
They moved the boxes, as if they thought someone could’ve been hiding in a tiny space behind them, and she noticed them glance inside.
Then they asked her to show them the shop.
As Margot watched them look inside the storeroom and under the counter, she glanced quickly across the street to the front of Petit’s.
It’d closed for the night, and she had to hope that, at that very moment, her book club friends were safe in the cellar with the maps and the banned books, surrounded by Lauterborn’s trunks.
Margot caught herself looking up at the ceiling, as if she could see through the floors to the helpless baby and the injured Theo.
That seemed to be the cue for the men to want to go up to search her flat. She assured them no one could’ve been up there except herself, but still, they politely insisted, and she had no way to refuse.
Even though they strode into her bedroom, her private space, like black shadows from hell, she couldn’t protest. They looked under the bed and inside the wardrobe, but didn’t seem to notice her stockings on the unmade bed.
Their search was oddly respectful – but she knew that’d change in an instant if they found anything.
They spotted the photos of Serge on her dressing table; their wedding photo, and another of him standing in front of the soaring Gothic facade of Rouen’s cathedral. Margot turned to water inside as they touched the mementos of her lost husband.
They hunted around the living room, under the table, behind chairs. Margot was relieved that they hadn’t seen Isabelle’s tiny clothes and nappies in the pile of laundry on an armchair. One of them picked up Herr Knuddel and her heart leapt when she saw a flash of recognition in his eyes.
But he put the bear down again and moved on. Margot wondered if he was merely remembering a bear of his own from his German childhood, but it didn’t do to think of these men as children, as innocent as any others until the Nazis had taken hold.
She kept forcing herself to smile, and pretending to yawn, as if she had nothing to hide, even though her body was rigid with tension. She couldn’t hear any sounds from upstairs; Theo was doing a good job of keeping Isabelle quiet, for now.
‘Well, you’ve seen everything now,’ Margot said, gesturing to the door of her flat. ‘It’s so late, I really need to get back to sleep.’
The young man who seemed to be the spokesperson for the duo paused on the landing and rested his gloved hand on the newel post. That hand had just rifled through Margot’s clothes and photographs and now the fingers drummed thoughtfully, beating out a rhythm as he glanced up the stairs.
‘We have another floor yet, I think?’ he said politely.
‘I have a tenant,’ Margot replied. She hated how their politeness was nothing more than a shiny veneer over intimidation and murder. ‘He’s Lauterborn’s brother. Surely you can’t disturb the Professor – his brother would never allow it.’
‘The Oberg—’ the man began as the door at the top of the stairs opened and the Professor strode out onto the landing. There was no sign of the gentleman Margot was coming to know though, as he barked at the men in furious, machine-gun German.
Margot stared up at him, alarmed. She knew he was putting it on to scare the SS troops off, but even so it came as a shock.
The soldier replied to the Professor in an unctuously polite tone, but when the reply came back it was as steely and firm as before. The wound in his leg was hidden behind a pair of dark blue pyjama trousers and he was wrapped in a red dressing gown, his hair disordered as if from sleep.
‘Madame, I’m sorry for my countrymen,’ the Professor told Margot. ‘I shall speak to my brother, make no mistake.’
The young man looked to his colleague and said something in German that sent him scurrying down the stairs.
He seemed content to remain though, as he explained in his careful, polite French, ‘I’ve sent word to Obergruppenführer Lauterborn.
’ Then he inclined his head. ‘We won’t detain you too long.
You understand, of course, these are very dangerous terrorists. ’
‘Terrorists you seem to think I might be sheltering,’ the Professor replied in French.
‘I needn’t tell you how offensive this is to a German.
I hope you don’t expect the lady and me to stand shivering in our nightclothes while you wait for my brother’s command?
’ Without waiting for the young man to reply, he asked Margot, ‘Will you join me for tea, madame?’
‘Yes, please, Professor,’ she replied.
She just hoped he had a plan. With his brother arriving any minute now, how could they keep Isabelle safe?