Flykiller

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Ruefully the line, which stretched alongside the waiting train, advanced one footstep: bundled-up, grey travellers in all but complete darkness, colds, coughs — sneezes — and, under a dim blue wash of light, two railed walkways below a distant signboard that read in heavy black letters on white: HALT! DEMARKATIONS-LINIE, and in very polite but much smaller French, Etes-vous en regie? Are your papers in order?

Hermann, as usual, thought it a great joke. His partner would be scrutinized, accosted, searched, perhaps even roughed up, simply because he was French and the boys on duty hated Schweinebullen more than anything else but dared not touch their own cops!

‘Relax. It’ll go easy this time. I can tell,’ confided Kohler. ‘Just act normal and don’t get hot under the collar.’

‘It’s too cold for that. It’s snowing heavily, or hadn’t you noticed?’

Emptied out of the train from Paris, Louis wasn’t happy. It was Thursday, 4 February 1943 — 2.47 a.m. Berlin Time, 1.47 the old time. Ever since 11 November last, when the Wehrmacht had moved into the South in response to massive Allied landings in North Africa, the whole of France had been occupied, yet still there was this wait, this frontier between what had since June 1940 been the zone occupee and the zone libre. Here, too, at Moulins, some fifty-five kilometres by road to the north of Vichy, the international spa that had become the capital.

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