Book Four: The Gunner's Line Part Six: The Capital Characters
Chapter Thirty
End of Mission
James Wheeler. Paris. Sunday, 6 May 1945.
He was taken alive in the wreckage of the state he had built.
Not everything had stopped.
The city had, and the north, and the west. But to the east, beyond the last of the houses, in the old fort at Vincennes and the woods round it, there were still men of the regime who had not heard, or had heard and did not believe it, or believed it and did not care. The last of the Sûreté’s own regiments, Lieutenant Garland said, and what was left of three divisions that had come back through the Île-de-France in March and had nowhere further to go.
On the Wednesday, the second of May, the battery came down off the hill and went across the north of the city to a park on the eastern side, to fire on them.
It was a strange park. It had been built in an old quarry, Peter said, and it had cliffs in it, real ones, and a lake at the bottom, and a rock standing up out of the lake with a little round temple on the top of it, white, with columns.
“Another cake,” said Szabo.
We put the guns on the lawns above the lake, between the flowerbeds. Somebody had planted the flowerbeds that spring, in the middle of all of it, in rows, red and yellow, and the trails went down among the tulips, and Brandauer stood and looked at the tulips for a while before he dug the spade in.
“In Holland they are eating them,” he said.
He dug the spade in.
Peter checked every set of numbers that came down against the red line on Garland’s map, all that day and the next. None of them were inside it. They went out over the roofs of the eastern districts to the fort and the woods.
“Vincennes,” he said, in the evening, for my paybook. “The fort. Or the woods south of it. Give or take.”
I wrote it, and put a question mark after it.
The news came on the Thursday afternoon, from a truck.
It was a British truck, a big one, full of soldiers in berets, going along the road at the top of the park towards the centre of the city, fast, and the men in the back of it were standing up and holding on to the hoops and shouting at everybody they passed, at the people on the pavements and at us.
“They’ve got him! They’ve got the old bastard!”
The truck went on round the corner and was gone.
“Got who?” said Dunne.
Nobody knew. We stood by the gun and looked at the corner where the truck had gone. Then Garland came across the lawn from the command post, which was in the park-keeper’s lodge, with a paper in his hand, and he was walking fast, which he did not usually.
“Delacroix,” he said. “This morning. The Guards found him in the cellars of the Ministry of the Interior. Alive.”
“Alive?” said Szabo.
“Alive. Sitting in the cellar with his secretary and two guards and a clerk. The guards gave up their rifles before anybody asked them to.” Garland looked at the paper. “He was sitting with his files. All of them. His government’s. Boxes and boxes.”
“Why didn’t he shoot himself?” said Szabo. “I’d have shot myself.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” said Hollis.
“He kept his files?” said Baca, from his box. “He didn’t burn them?”
“He didn’t burn anything. Every other ministry in Paris has been burning paper for a month. You could see the smoke from Saint-Denis. He kept his.”
“Why?” said Ridley.
Garland looked at him.
“Nobody knows,” he said.
Ridley did not say anything. His hand went up to his shirt pocket, where the major’s receipt was, and stayed there a moment, and came down.
“They’ll try him,” said Peter.
“What for?” said Dunne.
Peter looked at Dunne. He did not answer him. After a while Dunne looked away.
We fired twice on the Friday morning, on the woods south of the fort, eight rounds and then six.
At ten to eleven the telephone went again.
“Fire mission,” said Ridley.
He said the numbers. Peter went to the map in the lodge and came back at a run, and set them, and checked them, and said “Set.” Brandauer handed me the round, and I put it in, and pushed it home, and closed the block on it.
“Loaded.”
“Wait,” said Ridley.
We waited. That was ordinary. You waited all the time, loaded, for the order, sometimes a minute, sometimes ten. Ridley stood at the telephone with the receiver against his ear. Peter had his eye at the sight. I stood at the breech with my hands at my sides, the way you do, where they will be when you need them.
Ridley was listening for a long time. Then he said, “Say again,” and listened again.
Then he put the receiver down on its box, and straightened up.
“Cease firing,” he said.
Down the line the other sergeants were saying it, one after another. “Cease firing. Cease firing.” No. 1. No. 2. No. 4.
“Unload,” said Ridley.
I opened the block.
It came out the way they had taught us at Fort Sill in 1942 and I had never once done since, slowly, an inch at a time, with my hands round it and Brandauer’s hands underneath it, until it was out and the whole weight of it was in our arms. It was cold. It had been in the box all night. Brandauer took it from me and held it against his chest, like a child, and Hollis came and took the fuze out of the nose with the wrench, carefully, and screwed the plug in, and Brandauer laid the round down in its box, and shut the lid.
“Do I write it?” said Baca.
“Write it,” said Ridley.
Baca wrote. He said it as he wrote it, the way he did. “Cease fire. Eleven oh six. One round loaded.” He stopped with the pencil. “Not fired.”
“Not fired,” said Ridley.
Baca wrote it.
Ridley stood by the gun. He looked at us, all of us, one after another, standing round the gun on the lawn among the tulips.
“End of mission,” he said.
Nobody moved.
Garland came across from the lodge again, slower this time.
“The French have asked for terms,” he said. “All of them. Everywhere. The army’s ordered it, what’s left of it. Vincennes put a white sheet out of the fort ten minutes ago.” He looked at the gun, and at the box with the round in it. “That’s the war. In Europe. That’s it.”
“Over?” said Dunne.
“Over.”
“The whole thing?”
“In Europe,” said Garland.
Dunne laughed. It was a short laugh, one, and it surprised him, and he stopped.
“Now they’ll send us to Japan,” said Szabo.
Nobody answered him.
Brandauer sat down on the ammunition box with the round in it. Hollis took out a cigarette and lit it, and his hands were quite steady, and he looked at them. Peter took his glasses off and held them. Baca shut the book and sat with it on his knee and his bad leg out straight.
Ridley checked the gun. The breech, the block, the sight, the trails, the spades, the way he always did, once.
Then he checked it again.
Then he fetched the canvas cover for the muzzle from the truck, and put it on, and tied it, and stood there with his hand on it.
In the evening I asked Peter where the last one would have gone.
“Vincennes,” he said. “The woods. Give or take.”
I took out the paybook and wrote it, under the others. Then I drew a line through it, because nothing had gone there.
Peter watched me do it. He did not say anything.
That night the lights came on.
We were sitting by the guns in the dark, and one came on across the lake, a street lamp, on the road at the top of the park, and then another beside it, and then the whole road, and the windows of the houses beyond it, one after another, yellow, as if somebody was going along the street with a taper. And beyond the houses the sky over the city went pale, and then gold, all along, as far as you could see.
“Somebody’s going to catch it for that,” said Hollis.
He said it out of habit. Nobody laughed.
There were people in the streets. You could hear them, a long way off, towards the middle of the city, a sort of roar that came and went, and singing, and car horns, and once a band, and once something that might have been fireworks, and every man round the gun had his head up at the first bang, and kept it up till he was sure.
Nobody slept.
“What if the telephone goes?” said Dunne, in the dark.
“Then I’ll answer it,” said Ridley.
The telephone did not go. I lay on my blanket under the truck and listened to it not going. I listened to it not going for a long time. In the end I got up and went to the gun.
Ridley was there already, on the trail, in the dark, with his hand on the muzzle cover.
“Go to sleep, son,” he said.
“Yes, Sergeant.”
I sat down on the trail beside him. He did not tell me again.
The General came on the Saturday afternoon, in uniform again, in the car, with Harris. He had been at the Place Beauvau since Thursday night, with the Council’s people, in the cellars.
“They’re in order,” he said, to Ridley, by the gun. “Every file. Indexed. In his own ministry’s hand. He’d had them brought down from the floors above when he came there in March, and put in order, and he sat among them.” He looked at the muzzle cover. “They’re going to try him on his own paper. His signature on the decrees. His initials on every page that mattered.”
“Why didn’t he burn it, sir?” said Ridley.
“Nobody knows,” said the General. “I’d give a great deal to.”
He turned to me.
“Wheeler. I’ve had an answer about the other side. The French division that held the line south of Saint-Ouen in July burned its papers in August, before it ran. All of them.” He looked at me. “So there is nothing on their side either. I’m sorry.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Keep asking,” said the General.
“Yes, sir.”
He got back into the car. Harris drove him away along the lake, under the cliff, past the little temple on its rock, and up the road out of the park.
The bells began on the Sunday morning, at about eight.
It started with one, somewhere close, a single bell going slow and heavy, and then another further off, and another, and then all of them, from every direction, all over the city, near and far, high and low, all at once, more bells than I had known there were in the world.
Dunne was under the truck before the second one. Szabo had his helmet on. I was on my feet with my hands at my sides, at the breech, where they would be when I needed them, and the gun had its cover on.
“It’s Sunday,” said Peter.
He was sitting up on his blanket with his glasses in his hand.
“It’s Sunday,” he said again. “They’re ringing for Mass. And for the other thing. Some of them.”
Dunne came out from under the truck, slowly, and stood up, and brushed the grass off his knees.
Ridley stood by the gun with his hand on the muzzle cover. The bells went on, all over the city, for a long time, and none of us moved until they had stopped.