The Escape - Robert Muchamore Page 0,41
the spare house-key Marc found in Henderson’s study meant he could now use the front door, he still had no right to be in the house and he steered clear of the neighbours.
After ducking under the hedges enveloping the front gate, he looked to the top of the hill and saw that many of the men from the Dormitory Raquel also stood in the street, watching the receding flames. Smaller explosions continued to rumble, and it was fortunate that the wind was carrying the plumes of smoke away from them.
Running might attract undue attention, so Marc walked briskly downhill, patting his pockets for change to make sure that he had enough for an early lunch or late breakfast. Even though, on his daily trips to the cinema, he passed the café whose owner had directed him towards the Dormitory Raquel, he’d never eaten there again because he’d discovered a little place run by an Italian family not far from the church. The food was much better and Livia – the owner’s teenaged daughter – had huge breasts.
Livia, her father, her grandmother and several customers lined up in front of the café, admiring the flames.
‘Marc,’ the elderly grandmother said, smiling brightly. ‘How’s your uncle today?’
Café Roma was frequented by locals, and the first time Marc went inside he’d mentioned that he was staying with a sick uncle, deliberately remaining vague about exactly where he lived. Marc wasn’t proud of the lie, but the old woman called him a little trooper and never missed an opportunity to overfill his plate or give him a free glass of her chocolate mousse.
Marc would happily have exchanged all of the mousse in Paris for a single smile from her well-endowed granddaughter, but all Livia ever did was slam down plates and scowl at Marc like he was something stuck on her shoe.
‘My uncle isn’t too bad today,’ Marc said, as he tried desperately to remember yesterday’s lie so that he didn’t repeat it. ‘I gave him a shave and helped him in the bath.’
‘Oh, aren’t you a darling?’ the old lady said, with her ripe Italian accent. ‘I’ve made a fresh batch of meatballs and spaghetti. Would you like to try?’
‘It’s not even eleven,’ the owner noted, but Marc didn’t mind at all. At first he’d been wary of anything beyond the basic soups and stews he’d lived on all his life at the orphanage, but all the food he’d been served in the Café Roma was good, and longstanding connections with local markets and wholesalers meant that the café remained well stocked despite the food shortages.
‘So what’s going on over the hill?’ Marc asked, pointing at the flames.
‘The surrender,’ the café owner explained. ‘Didn’t you know? The Germans will enter the city at noon.’
Marc nodded. ‘I heard that on on the radio last night. So why are the Germans still bombing?’
‘That’s you French, not the Germans,’ the old lady explained. ‘They’re letting the Boche have Paris, complete with all the bridges across the Seine, but even the French Command isn’t dopy enough to hand the Germans their ammunition factories.’
‘Ahhh,’ Marc said, as realisation dawned. ‘I was sleep—erm … I had my uncle in the bath, so I’ve not heard any news this morning. What else are they saying?’
‘Not much,’ the owner said. The sky was still darkened with smoke but the fireball from the massive explosion was burning itself out. The old lady took up the answer to Marc’s question as Livia’s dad followed the first of his customers back inside the cramped café.
‘The army has closed all roads out of Paris to civilians so they can get their equipment out, and the Germans have promised to enter the city in a dignified manner and harm nobody,’ the old lady said. Then her lips thinned and she tossed curls of grey hair off her face. ‘I guess we’ll know in an hour.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Tours was on the main route between Paris and the south. A few well-placed bombs here could disrupt road and rail traffic through central France and force military supplies and troops to divert hundreds of kilometres through the countryside, causing delay and wasting increasingly scarce fuel supplies.
Ten days of intense bombing had turned the heart of the town into hell, destroying more than a third of the buildings, taking out all of the major bridges and cutting off supplies of gas, water and electricity. There wasn’t an unbroken window within two kilometres of the town centre.
But you didn’t have to venture far