Authors: Robert Muchamore
It took half an hour and two fresh buckets of water, starting at the top with his hair, scrubbing his body, then he washed his shirt, trousers and socks before finishing off by wiping down his rubber boots. The chlorine powder was the same stuff used in swimming pools, but Marc used it at a higher concentration. He had to avoid breathing the fumes, which reddened his eyes and burned the small cuts on his hands and torso. But after the demoralising effect of being covered in raw sewage, the stinging cleanliness was almost therapeutic.
The cleaning cupboard had spare towels for the commandant’s bathroom, and since prisoners weren’t issued towels, this was the first time Marc had towelled off since the day he’d been arrested. He wrung out his clothes, but couldn’t let them drip all over the floor so he hopped back inside naked.
He dried the inside of the bucket so that the cleaners didn’t suspect anything, then carefully replaced everything he’d used except for the damp towel, which he thought might make a good pillow. As he walked back to the balcony, Marc peeked over the filing cabinets and glanced down through windows that overlooked the inside of the market hall.
The lighting had been turned up and the wooden pen where the Gestapo usually kept prisoners awaiting deportation was filled with the fifty-odd men with whom Marc had shared a cabin on the
Adler
. They stood to attention in five short rows, with a Gestapo officer shouting so fast that a prisoner enlisted to translate into Polish couldn’t keep up.
‘I want you to think carefully,’ the Gestapo officer shouted. ‘Telling me what you know is in your interest. If Hortefeux is not found, I shall draw lots and every third man will be sent to punishment camp.’
Marc couldn’t hear all that was said, but the situation was clearly farcical. Most of these Polish and Flemish speaking prisoners couldn’t have held a conversation with Marc if they’d wanted to. The Gestapo officer changed tack and asked who spoke French, but nobody was prepared to admit a skill that would apparently lead to further interrogation.
At the same time, Marc saw the arrival of all the secretaries who worked downstairs. The two old battleaxes came fully dressed, but the younger women looked very different without their hair and makeup done. Some were even barefoot or in nightclothes, where the Gestapo had dragged them out of bed for maximum intimidation.
Marc became engrossed and got caught out when the door opened again. This time a pair of middle-aged police officers came in. They were lumbering creatures, clearly unhappy to have been dragged out of bed to join a city-wide search.
Marc scrambled away from the window and ran naked to the balcony. He scooped up his boots and wet clothes, then threw them up on to the roof before stepping on to the chair and climbing up after them.
A police siren down in the street made Marc even tenser as he lay flat on the roof, looking down at the balcony with grit sticking into his bare skin.
He waited more than ten minutes and was starting to think that the cops had left when the door out on to the balcony finally opened. As the cop shone his torch, Marc saw that the balcony floor had several damp footprints where he’d washed and one of his soggy socks balled up close to the chair leg.
‘Nice view up here,’ one officer noted, switching his torch off as he stepped out on to the balcony. ‘That’s the church where I got married, across the river.’
The other officer was younger, but still bald and the wrong side of forty. ‘Didn’t know you were married, boss.’
‘My marriage is too traumatic,’ the older officer laughed, as he pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and offered one to his colleague.
Marc’s heart pounded and he slid the pistol out of the prisoner jacket just in case. The younger man was looking around, but fortunately with the torch extinguished it was much harder to see the sock or the damp footprints.
‘You could get up on to the roof easily enough from here,’ the younger cop noted.
Marc pulled his clothes bundle tighter and got ready to run as the older officer looked around. The gun wouldn’t reload without its recoil spring, but with luck he could shoot one officer with the bullet in the chamber, jump down on to the market hall roof and run along the metal gantry until .. .
Until what?
‘You’re
more
than welcome to go clambering over rooftops,’ the older officer laughed, as he lit a match for the cigarettes. ‘But I won’t be joining you. They say this kid is fifteen. Is he really gonna run to Gestapo headquarters to hide?’
‘You mark my words. He’ll be squatting in a garden, or lying under a car. He’ll move when he gets hungry and they’ll pick him up at the first checkpoint he comes to. If it wasn’t the Baron’s grandson, I’d probably still be in bed listening to my wife snoring her ugly head off.’
‘The Standartenfuhrer said he smelled sewage up here,’ the younger officer said.
‘That pompous arse either smelled his own bullshit, or that stuck-up bitch Eiffel chuffed one out of her drawers.’
‘I still think …’
The older cop interrupted, sounding irritated. ‘We’d get bird shit all over our uniforms. Stop going on about it. Relax, smoke and watch the world go by. You’d better learn to take things easy if you’re gonna live to be an old man like me.’
Marc huddled in the rooftop shelter, damp clothes spread out to dry, towel under his head and the grubby prisoner jacket as a blanket. If they found him up here there was no escape, so he kept the gun close: better to blow his own brains out than go through brutal interrogation and die a few days later.
Hunger and nerves made sleep hard, but Marc clocked up a few ten-or twenty-minute bursts. It was one of the warmest days of the year so far and thirst began to torment him as morning broke.
Occasionally he heard muffled conversations, or a cabinet drawer slamming in the archives below. A few times he thought he heard footsteps on the flat roof, but pigeons were the only company that existed outside his imagination.
The day passed agonisingly. Marc started feeling light-headed as his body demanded food and water, but it would be insanely risky to venture down into the office before the Labour Administration staff clocked off at 6 p.m. In some ways the hunger was a relief: having an appetite made him hopeful that he’d fought off the stomach bug.
With no watch it was hard to judge time, but when Marc finally saw the sun dropping behind smoking factory chimneys, he decided it was nearer to seven than six and made his move.
His clothes were dry, if a little stiff. The chlorine had partly bleached his trousers, leaving them colour streaked and a few shades lighter. This was actually a lucky accident, because the Gestapo would have picked up the matching jacket that he’d left on his bunk when Fischer dragged him out of bed.
The chair had been taken back inside, so Marc had to swing over the roof’s edge and drop on to the balcony. It would have been no problem when he was fit, but the landing buckled his weak knee and sent waves of pain through his chest and legs.
The balcony door didn’t have a lock. Marc peered cautiously into the sixth-floor office and was pleased to see all lights off and nobody home. He trembled as he dashed the length of the office towards the toilet. The wall clock said 6:25, which was earlier than he’d have liked, but his only concern was sticking his head under the cold tap and gulping his first drink in fifteen hours.
Food was Marc’s next thought. He ventured down to the fifth-floor offices after ten minutes carefully listening for signs of life. The open staircase gave a clear view over the market hall. There was a rush down below, with prisoners frantically loading a pair of trains in the sidings out back.
Pallets, barrels, tank tracks, bags of horse feed and even huge artillery pieces had to be lifted on to open carriages by two-dozen prisoners using a manual hoist. German supervisors motivated their staff with angry shouts and riding crops.
It was the kind of chaos Marc had hoped to run into the night before, but he now had no intention of leaving without money and a much clearer escape plan.
He was pleased to find the fifth-floor office locked, which meant there was no late meeting, or last-minute letters being typed inside. It was the same type of lock that he’d popped on the sixth floor the night before, and the benefit of experience meant he cracked it with the bent recoil spring in seconds.
Thinking of his stomach, Marc opened the secretaries’ desk drawers, hoping to find something. When that failed he rifled through bins. His quest for a crust or apple core was fruitless, but he scored a minor haul in Commandant Eiffel’s office.
She must have had an important meeting earlier in the day, because a tray with plates and used coffee cups rested on her sideboard. It would have been Marc’s job to clean this up when Vogel was commandant, but Eiffel had left it for the cleaners.
Sugar was in short supply, but a couple of spoonfuls remained in the bottom of a silver bowl, along with the dry edge of a pastry and a blob of jam stuck to the side of a plate. Marc dived in, tipping the sugar granules into his mouth, cramming down the pastry, dabbing up all the loose pastry crumbs and washing it all down with a splash of cold and revolting ersatz coffee
5
.
It was less than a tenth of the daily calories a teenager like Marc needed to survive, but the sugar rush gave an instant energy boost. As his mind came into focus, Marc considered his main dilemma:
Over time, the Gestapo would start to believe he’d already left the area and scale down their search. If he could wait another day or two, he’d be able to skip town more easily. But he was already feeling light-headed. There was no food here and if he didn’t eat properly soon, he wouldn’t have the strength to escape.
*
Marc spent the next hour working up a set of documents. Travel permits were only valid for a journey commencing on a specific day, but with an unlimited supply of blanks he typed himself permits for each of the next four days. He gave himself different names and destinations, then typed up prisoner release letters that he could use to get identity and ration cards from an administrative office when he arrived in France.
When everything was stamped, signed and triple-checked for errors, he put the whole lot in an envelope, along with the two lookalike photographs he’d found the night before. He couldn’t stick the pictures down until he knew which set he’d end up using.
The RLA regularly sent prisoners from one place to another, so the office had a railway map and timetables for most of the major routes.
Marc had already studied German trains when he’d arranged to escape with his cabin mates aboard the
Oper
. The Frankfurt–Bonn–Paris route he’d selected then was fast and direct, but that plan had relied on having nobody missing them until after they’d reached France.
Marc was now the most wanted fugitive in Frankfurt, so he needed to do something more sophisticated than simply going to the main station and booking tickets for the most obvious route home.
He spent thirty minutes studying alternatives, including travelling from local stations where security was likely to be more relaxed, and the possibility of throwing the Gestapo off the scent by travelling deeper into Germany before boarding a train that crossed into France.
He wrote down several routes and lists of train times, but no one route stood out. They all had their own set of risks and danger, and the longer he studied the railway map the more his thoughts turned back to his growling stomach.
Marc had thought up two options for food. The first was to sneak down into the market hall, locate crates of canned food waiting to be loaded on to a train and steal some. But food pallets were always well guarded from theft by the hungry prisoners, there would be an investigation when the damaged boxes were found and his diet would be restricted to a single type of food.
The second option was to use the staff canteen. Marc had collected Commandant Vogel’s lunch on many occasions. Although the Reich Labour Administration was a civilian organisation, the commandant and senior staff who worked in Großmarkthalle were given a military ration ticket, allowing them to eat in the canteen.
Vogel always kept his lunch tickets in his desk, but Marc had already searched the commandant’s office when he’d been looking for food and apparently Eiffel carried her card around. But Marc knew that unissued ration cards were kept in a locked metal cabinet.
He could have picked the lock, but didn’t even need to do that because Vogel was a forgetful soul who kept spare keys taped behind the toilet cistern in his private bathroom. If he’d told Eiffel about them before he got sent east, she hadn’t bothered to move them.
Lunch ticket books were stamped with the owner’s name when they were issued, but individual perforated tickets could be torn off and used separately, allowing staff to pick up food for colleagues.
Marc swiped a brand-new book with fourteen tickets, along with a few coins from the petty cash tin, from which Vogel or one of the battleaxe sisters used to give him money when he was sent to the post office with telegrams. Taking a larger sum would be noticed, so Marc decided not to risk that until he was leaving for good.
Wearing his prisoner jacket and trying his best to look confident and purposeful, Marc moved downstairs, shuddering involuntarily as he passed the fourth-floor landing in front of Gestapo headquarters.
One of the trains was still being prepared for departure. He dodged prisoners pushing overloaded carts and made it down the hallway to a basement canteen, earning nothing more stressful than a curious glance from one of the German supervisors.
Marc assumed the greatest risk would be getting recognised by one of the canteen staff, and he kept his hand on the gun in his pocket as he exited the main hall and walked down ten metres of corridor.
Hunger made even the sulphurous smell of stewed greens appealing. What Marc hadn’t anticipated was stepping in and finding the serving counter shuttered and nothing in the seating area but condiments, crumbs and a few scrunched newspapers.