Hunting Ground by J. Robert Janes Read Free Book Online Page A

asked.
    ‘In the general mobilization of last August? Ah, no. He’s essential where he is.’
    ‘The Louvre. They’re crating everything they can and shipping it to repositories in châteaux along the Loire. I can’t imagine that place with its doors closed and locked.’
    ‘He’s at the Sorbonne, a professor.’
    ‘But is also attached to the Louvre.’
    ‘Yes. Yes, he’s there also.’
    ‘What have they got him doing?’
    At times, Tommy demanded answers, and this was one of them. It wasn’t simply the determined look in those deep brown eyes with their touches of green, or the set of his chin. It was everything about him. ‘He’s making an inventory of all the holdings in private collections.’
    Again, I heard him say, ‘How lovely,’ like a schoolboy—tickled pink but with the salt of larceny. ‘It’ll be done in time then,’ he added. ‘He’ll see to it. You can bet your bottom dollar.’
    I had to wonder how much he actually knew about Jules. ‘In time for what?’ I hazarded.
    ‘For when the Nazis arrive, as they will.’
    He asked if Marcel could have sold things to that shop, and I realized then what he’d been after all along, and I knew I couldn’t lie to him, even though the items would have to have been stolen. ‘Marcel, he’s not above such things.’
    And the husband must know this, but all Tommy did was to nod curtly. For him, for me the matter was closed, or so I thought. But, of course, it wasn’t. It could never have been, not with someone like Tommy.
    You mustn’t think that I paid no attention to the day-to-day events of the war or that I was self-centred and uncaring of the tragedy that was happening to others. At the time of Tommy’s visit, and from then on, that whole business was constantly with me, but just like everyone else, there were things I had to do. The children, school for Jean-Guy in Fontainebleau, sometimes the car, sometimes the walk, mostly our bicycles, but if I’d known then what I know now, I’d have driven to and from everyday. There was also the firewood to get and split, the house to clean, the garden, et cetera. Jules and all that mess with my sister.
    Having joined hands with Hitler and eaten the eastern half of Poland, the Russians now threatened war with Finland. A German submarine had penetrated the British naval base at Scapa Flow and had sunk the Royal Oak , a battleship, with the loss of 833 men, most of whom had been asleep. Mines were being sown at sea by aeroplanes. The RAF was dropping leaflets on Berlin. Leaflets! Can you imagine? Sides were being chosen. Nearly one hundred sixty thousand men of the British Expeditionary Force were stationed in northern France along the Belgian border, but the British were not doing their fair share, according to the French who had, by then, mobilized something like two-and-a-half million men. To be British was to be … ah, what can I say? Suspect? Unwanted? This feeling was to grow strongly later, after the defeat, the old animosities surfacing. Jeanne d’Arc, Napoléon, and all that rubbish.
    Tommy’s warning kept coming back to me and I thought again and again about taking the children to England while there was still a chance. My father wasn’t well, so I could use that excuse. I wanted so much to see him but Jules wouldn’t have let me take the children, not at a time like that or any other. No, if I went, I’d have to kidnap them. So I waited. I thought a lot about it. I tried to lay in enough things to help us over the worst of times. Petrol, food, clothing, medicines—all those sorts of things, even pears. Everyone else was hoarding, so why shouldn’t I?
    Tommy’s thirty thousand francs was my escape money, and I thanked God each night for such generosity in a fellow human being—he had let me keep the earrings and had said we should simply consider it a loan—and sometimes as I lay there in my loneliness, I made love to him in my mind.
    But more of Jules, more of my husband. In that