7
Long shadows fingered the carnival where a coal-black Renault, the two-door Primastella—the 1934, St-Cyr thought—sat at the end of the snow-covered lane on a gentle rise up near the Noah’s Ark and the dangling, shattered biplanes of the Pilot in the Sky. Two men in grey fedoras and broad-shouldered overcoats, their cigarettes alight, stood waiting all but in darkness with hands in their pockets, one on either side of that car.
‘The colonel’s detectives,’ sighed Hermann.
Perhaps one hundred metres lay between the two vehicles. From the Textilfabrikschrijen it hadn’t taken twenty minutes with Hermann at the wheel. There had been no time, really, to talk things over, and yet word had gone ahead and these two had come out here.
‘Löwe Schrijen must have called them, Louis, as soon as we left the gates.’
‘The trigger element, Hermann.’
‘Guncotton wrapped in papier-mâché. I’m certain of it. If we didn’t have company, I’d touch a match to it.’
‘Burns with a very hot flame; explodes if a detonator is used. Is made from pure cellulose, of which Eugène Thomas had plenty. Cold nitric acid too, and sulphuric acid.’
‘But they wouldn’t have needed a detonator, not with the trinitrophenol.’
‘The flame of the one would have been perfectly adequate for the other, but why had he been sentenced in absentia? Surely he would have wanted to escape as much as the rest of that combine?’
‘But they’d asked him to do something and he had refused. He must have, Louis. One for all and all for one because that’s the way it has to be.’
‘That cutthroat you found in their office wagon … Had they been planning to use it on someone?’
‘They must have. They’ve been gathering solder and making uniform buttons, badges and collar pips which Dorsche doesn’t yet know of.’
‘And that tourer of Sophie Schrijen’s brother enters and leaves the Works without challenge.’
The two up ahead were still patiently watching them. ‘Löwe Schrijen says his son was at Natzweiler-Struthof the weekend Renée was hanged,’ said Kohler.
‘Yet the boy couldn’t have been. Weber, the garage mechanic, has stated that Alain unexpectedly arrived at the railway station on that Saturday afternoon and that Sophie had to drive the car there for him to use. That’s why the Mademoiselle Ekkehard went out to the carnival alone instead of her.’
‘But if we are to believe Schrijen, the girl then left a note in lipstick that said, “I can’t go on. Please forgive me,” and what do I find in Alain Schrijen’s desk, in the corner that sister of his reserves for herself, but a lipstick and a little piece of granite from the quarry camp.’
This hole they were digging for themselves seemed bottomless. ‘Did the son kill that girl, Hermann? Did he discover what that Winterhilfswerk Committee was really up to and attempt to put an end to it?’
‘She skis and or walks all night, and could well have caught one of the local trains or thumbed a ride. Neuf-Brisach and Alt-Breisach aren’t that far. Maybe seven and a dozen kilometres from here.’
‘And, if she could get across the Rhine between them, where to, then? A girl who wears a beret that is forbidden.’
‘She wasn’t,’ said Kohler. ‘She was wearing a woollen toque, according to Henri Savard, the carpenter who made that coffin. Rasche must have removed the one and replaced it with the other, but why would he do a thing like that if they were up to something and where did he get it? From her rucksack?’
‘Or a room at the Lutze residence.’
Still the colonel’s two detectives hadn’t moved. ‘This isn’t looking good for us, Hermann. Schrijen sends van-loads of his wine to the Gauleiter Wagner.’
‘At no charge and guess who has been invited to the wedding now a funeral and also to the fundraiser a certain combine must still want to know is continuing, especially in view of what’s happened to another of their members and with a visit to Natzweiler-Struthof a distinct probability.’
Merde but they needed a cigarette to share.
‘Saturday, 6 March, is the target date,’ said Kohler. ‘Nearly everything is ready, including buckets of papier-mâché balls that just need a bit of paint and a match. What the hell were those boys really up to, eh? Guncotton flaming to trinitrophenol?’
‘And three young women, each of whom was a rebel in her own right. A bookshop that reminds its customers of book burnings, its proprietor a fired teacher who admits to being bitter about a mother who is being held in the internment camp at Vittel which she visits on the last Friday of every month, and if that isn’t opportunity enough to make contact with the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, what is?’
‘A chairman’s daughter who, beside what they are actually receiving, impulsively jots down the calorie intakes necessary for men at hard labour, and a secretary who steals police snapshots of those two so that her friend—’
‘Her lover, Hermann. I’m almost certain of it.’
‘And yet another reason for her to insist that death was murder. Snapshots so that she can see who’s been following her and not following that same secretary.’
‘Whom Frau Lutze tells us brought to the house or bookshop the travel papers Victoria Bödicker needed for Vittel, rather than have the bookseller visit the Polizeikommandantur too often. Good of the colonel, wasn’t it? No wonder he’s worried.’
‘Frau Lutze, Louis, formerly Fräulein Yvonne Eva Ellmann. Schrijen made a point of telling me “she was one of those on her father’s side.”’
Which discretely meant half-Jewish. ‘A woman who has a daughter, Hermann, at the University of Strasbourg in Clermont-Ferrand.’
‘That marriage is a puzzle, isn’t it, since Rasche was once hot and heavy with Yvonne and Löwe Schrijen knows all about it even to asking me what the colonel hoped to gain by claiming murder instead of suicide?’
‘Which we now know it definitely was, at least in the case of his secretary.’
‘An ampoule and a droplet earring that girl was searching for …’
‘A girl, Hermann, who didn’t even like the taste of schnapps or an eau-de-vie and who could make a glass of wine last all evening. Drugged was what Sophie Schrijen asked the bookseller, that one in turn demanding to know why she hadn’t accused her brother of raping the Fräulein Ekkehard at that skiing party. An event which causes the sister to wonder if the girl hadn’t cried out the truth about her feelings for men and for herself.’
‘And all the rest of it, like moving deserters through to the Vosges.’
‘Talk to those two. Use your charm. See if they’ll tell you why they were following Sophie Schrijen. That Primastella is no match for a Citroën traction-avant. I’ll go round them and leave the car up by the Devil’s Saucer. I’ll get to that office wagon before the three of you.’
‘You’d best have these, then.’
Her keys. ‘I knew I could count on you. Now reach under the seat and hand me my Lebel.’
‘It’s back at the house. I didn’t think we’d need the firepower.’
‘Then think again!’
‘Have you any more matches?’
The last of the light was fast fading. ‘Haven’t you?’
‘I gave them all to the Russians.’
‘Merde, what is it with you? Now I’ll have to head over to the farmhouse for lanterns and matches!’
‘Ask for bread, marg’ and a bucket of their potato soup. It’s the least the Army can do, seeing as we’re working for one of them.’
Alone, St-Cyr stood where the Primastella had been. ‘Hermann,’ he heard himself saying. They’d taken him. ‘To Löwe Schrijen?’ he demanded and knew it must be so.
‘They can pick me up at any time,’ he rebelled, for here in Elsass he was an alien on a temporary pass.
Hermann’s footprints were next to where the taller one had stood—the other one hadn’t come round his side of the car. He would have held a gun on Hermann, forcing him to get into the car.
Turning toward where the Citroën idled, its headlamps blinkered, he said, ‘Things have finally caught up with us, haven’t they? The honesty, the dogged pursuit of common crime no one seems to want to bother about but ourselves.’
The snow in the Primastella’s ruts was packed down hard. He’d walk along one of them even though the new overboots were perfect, would turn to look back at where those footprints had met.
‘A pillowcase,’ he muttered. While squeezing himself into the backseat of that little car, Hermann had managed to drag it from a pocket and flick it behind himself. Unseen by either of those two, it lay forlornly between the ruts, caught in the light of a borrowed Wehrmacht torch.
‘Newspapers,’ he hazarded, much puzzled, ‘and a little carving, though not a child’s toy. Boudicca, Hermann. Queen of the Iceni in what is now Norfolk.’
And freedom.
To the west, the iron and slatted skeleton of the Ferris wheel raised dark and silent circles to the night sky. Closer in and even darker, were the remains of the Salon Carousel and Ideal Caterpillar, and when he brought the Citroën to a halt deep in this lost city of theirs, the House of Mirrors waited.
‘Renée Ekkehard,’ said Kohler with a sigh, his knees jammed uncomfortably against the back of the front seat. ‘She got away from the two of you on that Saturday, didn’t she?’
There was no answer. There hadn’t been a word from either of them. The taller one was behind the wheel and solidly filling that seat, the one with the bullfrog neck, the shoulders and the gun feeding lighted cigarettes to himself and his partner.
They weren’t taking him back to the Textilfabrikschrijen. They were heading off into the hills to the northwest of town and with the headlamps unblinkered, were taking him to the vineyards near Kaysersberg, but first they’d ask him a few questions. ‘She knew that Karneval like the palm of her hand, didn’t she?’ he taunted. ‘Ach, just when you thought you had her cornered, the little Schlampe would slip away. The Devil’s Saucer, Maze of Darkness, Super Car Monte Carlo … She wasn’t about to let you kill her, was she, so she grabbed her skis and buggered off as soon as darkness fell but you knew she loved to find things and that she’d have to come back, and you knew that either of her friends on that committee could easily have sat down beside her, pretending to have found a little something she wanted, but that was on Sunday, wasn’t it?’
Kohler was just pissing about, said Hervé Paulus to himself. He’d light another Gauloise bleu for Serge and see if this Kripo had figured out how they’d come upon such a supply. Burnt, ground parsnips for coffee? A lovely oil from beechnuts? ‘Floaters’—hadn’t Kohler told the woman he and St-Cyr worked in the ‘never-never land of shadows’? ‘Missing persons,’ Frau Oberkircher had blubbered. ‘Fraud and bank robberies,’ she had coughed and crapped herself.
He and St-Cyr had even hired a horse-drawn sleigh to take the old bag home from the railway station. Home to fruit leathers and boiled sweets she could no longer make to sell to schoolchildren!
‘That girl fingered you, didn’t she?’ said Kohler. ‘She stole mug shots of you so that Schrijen’s daughter could get a better bead on the two of you, but what I can’t understand, meine Schatzen, is why he had you follow his daughter and not Renée Ekkehard. Chairperson of this and that, wasn’t she, this Sophie of his? Paragon of Nazi virtue and favourite of Gauleiter Wagner?’
‘Silence!’ shrilled Paulus. ‘You’re some treasure yourself! Refusing to tell Herr Schrijen what he wishes to know? Looking for trouble when he told you there couldn’t possibly be any? Are you too stupid to listen to someone like that?’
‘Hervé, leave it,’ muttered the other one. ‘We’ll find a place up ahead and soon.’
‘Dummköpfe,’ swore Kohler. ‘Renée definitely wasn’t what Schrijen wanted for that son of his, so he told you to make it look like a suicide, even to your scribbling a note in lipstick. Where’d you get the war paint, eh? From one of your Huren? Hey, you two left things lying around you shouldn’t have and guess who found them?’
There wasn’t a murmur from either of them, which wasn’t good. At least now he knew Schrijen had been telling them what to do, but that could only mean there were others who would be after Louis. ‘She was up to mischief, wasn’t she, that daughter of his? She didn’t like what was going on at the Works. Starving the men while working them to death? Freezing the poor bastards? Unsafe working conditions and no doctor? Lieber Christus im Himmel, is it any wonder she rebelled?’
Still they didn’t respond but now the car was climbing more steeply into the hills. The rear wheels skidded, clouds hid the moon, but with the snow cover there was still sufficient light. Vineyards were on either side. They couldn’t be far from the house now, but they’d have to stop first, have to soften up this Kripo.
‘This will do, Hervé,’ said the one behind the wheel. Banks of plowed-up snow lay on either side and, of course, there was no one else about.
‘I don’t need to take a piss.’
‘When we’re done with you, mein Lieber, you will,’ said Serge Deiss. He would leave the engine running, would let Hervé get out first and then pull the back of the seat forward for this Schweinebulle from Paris.
One lead-weighted leather truncheon, taken from the floor, came softly to rest on top of the car and was slid over to the driver’s side, the other kept to hand. ‘Look, I’ll stay here. I’ve no need to get out.’
‘Don’t be difficult,’ said Deiss. ‘We have our orders.’
Both now had their guns out. ‘Ach, my shoelace has come undone. Hang on a minute.’
The wind was down, the silence of the carnival absolute. On the ring of keys Hermann had taken from Sophie Schrijen’s desk there were those to the executive offices and others in the administration block, but also those to various sheds and storerooms, even one to the garage, no doubt, and those to the houses in town and in the country. And if left once in haste on that desk of her brother’s, could they not have been left another time and copied by that combine’s assistant machinist so that doors that needed to be opened for trinitrophenol could be, or was her association with Eugène Thomas so trusting she simply let him borrow her keys when needed? Certainly she would miss them, but would she ask Frau Macher if they’d been seen, would she dare to ask that father of hers, since by now she must have realized who had taken them?
Six others, all nearly identical, were to the padlocks on the wagons here, only two of which they had yet been in and yes, Renée Ekkehard must have had a set of her own, though no mention had been made of them by Colonel Rasche. Had he taken them; had her killer?
The bread was hard, coarse, sour, and being dry, rather difficult to swallow. Gripping the chunk between his teeth, he found the appropriate key and, ignoring the Wehrmacht no-entry notice, removed the padlock only to pause, to listen again and to look over a shoulder. The bare branches of the Kastenwald being nearby, one could not help but think of that girl going in there on skis, but had she done so in the afternoon of that Saturday or only after dark, and why, please, had she been out all night, if not to escape her killer or killers?
With the wagon’s door tightly closed behind him and one of the full-length, heavily framed mirrors leaning against it for good measure, the coffin screws came undone and its lid was gently drawn halfway back.
‘So that I can use it as a table,’ he said. ‘We haven’t much time, mademoiselle. I greatly fear we are about to have company.’
Her face was now more livid and swollen, the lips of a darker plum-purple. Decay would be rapid if she was allowed to warm. The blotches would meld and take on iridescent hues, the sprays of petechiae also; the once sea-green eyes that must have been lovely and full of life would soon collapse and drain.
More flecks of gilding and sawdust had fallen into them, and for this he apologized. ‘An autopsy,’ he muttered. ‘We absolutely must have one but are being denied it.’
Setting the bread aside, he opened Hermann’s little sack and arranged everything on the lid. ‘Boudicca,’ he said of the carving. ‘Bien sûr, nothing seems new in this world of ours, does it? Stripped of her family’s holdings by the Romans, she objected loudly to the loss and was publically flogged naked and forced to watch as her daughters were raped. In rebellion, she rose up to lead most of the Celtic tribes of the British Isles against them. Camulodunum, the Roman capital, fell and was sacked and burned, other hillforts and settlements too, their collaborationist Celts put to the sword, and then Londinium, but in A.D. 62 she was betrayed, it is said, by one of her own. Rather than suffer capture, she and her daughters took poison. Three females, mademoiselle. The number three just keeps turning up, doesn’t it? Three ravens, the three of you on that Winterhilfswerk Committee?’
He would give her a moment, would run his eyes down these stained scraps of newspaper Hermann had gathered from the living quarters of those men, would smooth each of them out.
‘As a boy of five I was rather sickly,’ he said, for sometimes it helped to recount such things to a victim. ‘Cod-liver oil was of no use, iron tonics neither, and not just the stone-filings from a carpenter’s nail. Fifteen francs a bottle my dear papa paid for that stuff. Weeks in bed were prescribed. “He needs rest,” the doctor said, giving my poor mother little to hope for but a lifetime of nursing, and grand-maman little patience. “Courage,” she said to maman. “Don’t flood the house with your tears. The boy can’t swim though I’ve warned him he’d best learn.”
‘She read to me.’ He indicated the carving. ‘Of course at such a tender age the word defilement meant little, but to be stripped and flogged by an enemy was sufficient for what my grandmother most wanted to implant. That wherever oppression exists, there will be those who rise up against it. Boudicca is from the Celtic word bouda, meaning victory, mademoiselle. In English, the equivalent name is, of course, Victoria. Many of those from Lille, and from Brittany too, have Celtic/Gallic ancestors. Was it the assistant machinist who carved this as he did the buttons for the waistcoat the colonel was having made? A boar, a stag, a salmon … these too.’
He set Thomas’s wedding ring and one of the spoons down on the lid. ‘Let’s admit that this artist and artisan remembered the centuries of his ancestors, but what is more important, did so deliberately and not just to improve the lives of his comrades. And as to his having instructed you in such things, though you loved the woods, you constantly felt a forbidding presence, and in this the colonel was, I believe, telling us the truth.’
Three ravens, three crows … The Phantom Queen.
‘The supreme goddess of all that is perverse and horrible amongst the powers of the supernatural. My second wife was a Breton and at times very superstitious, as are many Bretons.’
Morr’igan …
‘And Badhbh, the Crow-Raven, and Nemhain, that of Frenzy and Panic. There are always the three, though really they are but one and the same.’
Morr’igan. But showing herself as three solitary ravens or crows.
‘Was it that assistant machinist who pumped you full of Celtic mythology? More importantly, please, why did he do so? Admit it, you were desperately afraid, mademoiselle. You knew that what you and the other two were involved in could only end in disaster, but did he and the others then find out and plan to use it for themselves?’
Sophie was being followed. …
‘That father of hers learned what the three of you were up to, didn’t he? That is why those two detectives of the colonel’s came and took my partner.’
But did Colonel Rasche also find out? Did Werner and Yvonne? A Winterhilfswerk fête, a little Karneval of our own? Games of chance, target shooting and a Jeu de massacre? A Bottle Fish …
The carving of the chariot and its rider had a short round peg under it and could not be set quite upright. ‘My partner and I haven’t had a chance to discuss things thoroughly, mademoiselle. There are still things he knows that I don’t; those that I do, and he doesn’t.’
Opening the cutthroat which must have come from that barbershop for it was every bit the same, he flashed its blade and asked, ‘Did you know of this? Come, come, you weren’t exactly the blithe spirit you wanted others to perceive.’
Staring at the ceiling, surrounded by hideously garish masks, murals and distorting mirrors, she lay silent.
He’d sigh, then, thought St-Cyr, and say, ‘You didn’t know about this razor, did you? You’re as shocked as I am that those five men for whom you and Victoria and Sophie would risk so much, should in turn contemplate betraying you with something like this. Admit it, mademoiselle, of all of those five men, Eugène Thomas had the best chance of taking it, since he had the confidence of Sophie Schrijen.’
The Primastella’s engine didn’t idle well. Each time the engine faltered, the beams from its headlamps would dim and a breath would be held, but then the damned things would brighten.
‘You should have that looked at,’ said Kohler. Caught in the light, he waited, facing them, and as they advanced, their shadows were thrown ahead of them: pulled-down fedoras first and then the rest; Gauloises bleues being sucked on, tobacco smoke drifting into the cold night air, the one much taller, bigger in every way than the other who was to the right. ‘Ach, can’t we talk this over?’
They hesitated. A split second passed, but on they came and well apart. The tall one would start it, the shorter one would wait but momentarily. Breath billowed—his own. Light from the car was blinding him. Silent still, they drew closer. Both cudgels would now be raised. The tall one would hit first and high—the left shoulder or forearm. The other one would try for the back of the right calf or knee. They would want him to fall over.
The headlamps dimmed, the engine coughed. Kohler lunged at the tall one, grabbed the cudgel in mid-stroke, felt the jar of it, the pain, found himself slipping, losing balance as he cried out. Over and over they rolled, fists flailing, hands grabbing, forehead trying to smash him and smash him. The bastard was too strong, too heavy. An ear was bitten, eyes were gouged, blood tasted, a hand thrust under a bristled chin to force the head to stop butting him, the other one’s truncheon glancing off a shoulder. Now his back was being clobbered and instinctively each time it was hit, it arched, causing him to lose his grip.
From one side of the road to the other, they rolled, grabbing, choking, punching, struggling, the tall one trying desperately to tear the shoelace from around his throat but the cord cut too deeply.
Knees jammed hard against the son of a bitch’s back, Kohler spat hard and tried to avoid the other one’s truncheon, had best kill this one. Couldn’t avoid it. Verdammt!
‘Don’t!’ yelled Hervé Paulus, backing away a little. ‘Serge, I’ll try to get him to stop.’
Arms flailed, eyes bulged, the tall one’s struggling began to slacken … ‘Toss that thing of yours away. Don’t and I really will kill him.’
‘Serge …’ hazarded the shorter one, pitching the truncheon to the road but not far enough.
‘Your gun,’ managed Kohler, catching ragged breaths as the weapon bounced and skidded to the edge of the road but didn’t bury itself in the snow like it should have. ‘Now go and put your hands flat on the bonnet of the car. Stand with your back to us.’
They weren’t done with Kohler, swore Hervé Paulus. Serge would get his breath back and come at him when he least expected it. And then Kohler would get a fistful of handcuffs in the mouth. They would both fall on him and beat him senseless.
Coughing, his chest heaving, Serge Deiss toppled over and lay there repeatedly flexing himself into the fetal position as he clawed at his throat. Blood from his right ear stained the snow and oh for sure, it wasn’t good, that ear, thought Kohler. They would really hate him now, these two, the Kolmar SS as well and even Kramer at Natzweiler-Struthof.
The flame of the lantern stirred but otherwise there wasn’t a sound. Though he listened hard, St-Cyr swore he could hear nothing. The wagon was indeed like an ancient, albeit garishly decorated and cluttered tomb—a long barrow of its own, he thought, remembering the Gallic and pre-Gallic tumuli and standing stones of the Quiberon Peninsula and the Morbihan in Brittany.
‘Ah, bon, mademoiselle, a crudely fashioned coat-hood with its insulation of daily newspapers. Inoffensive and logical enough under cursory examination, nor does it matter particularly if the hood was that of Eugène Thomas instead of one of the others, but did he often go into Sophie Schrijen’s office? Isn’t that where he first discovered these newspapers? “Karen is at the age where she desires children.” Loves Wagner, mademoiselle? “Beate is blonde.” Likes Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, from Wagner’s magnificent tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen? Wants a man, a lover who will appreciate the same? “Guidance” is needed. In each of these personal messages it’s more or less the same, yet they are separated by many others and by time and location from city to city forcing me to ask, Is this how you three were contacted?’
She gave no answer. Quickly he glanced over the lid of the coffin. The carving was to the left, then the personals columns and that partly masticated papier-mâché ball. The phosphorescent swastika button was next, after it the desperate bead of solder Hermann had found and the weeks and months of secrecy and planning it must imply.
Spread open at its torn page, the school notebook of Victoria Bödicker made him murmur. ‘Bouda, Munich, the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten and freedom.’
Again St-Cyr read the chemical equations for viscose rayon and the single formula for picric acid. ‘It was Raymond Maillotte who wrote this last, wasn’t it? He came into the lab to lean over Eugène Thomas and remind him of it. Only he and Thomas had passes to be there.’
Again she offered nothing. ‘There are also these,’ he said. ‘The tip of the glass ampoule that cut my partner’s finger and the earring that was taken from that biscuit tin, most probably to distract you. And then, there are these.’
He held up the three delicately stemmed liqueur glasses, but did not ask who had sat down beside her in that other wagon. Instead he said, ‘Those men were planning a break-out, mademoiselle, but for some reason Eugène Thomas refused to do what they had asked of him which is unfortunate, for they could not have known of the pistol Sophie Schirijen keeps in the glove compartment of her brother’s car when that one is not around, and yes, she would not have told anyone of it, not when desperately afraid for her life. Which leaves us with the cutthroat, doesn’t it? And an explosion. A big one.’
Frau Oberkircher’s suitcase had never been much, yet as he took it from the Primastella, Kohler remembered he had gotten such a kick out of talking to her on the train. It had really felt like coming home, like it used to be.
And now? he wondered as he set the case on the bonnet. ‘Now what have you two done to her, a war widow well into her sixties?’
‘Contraband,’ spat Hervé Paulus. ‘She was planning to sell them on the black market.’
The son of a bitch had tried to smash this Kripo with Polizeikommandantur bracelets and had found he couldn’t. Legs spread widely for balance, hands now cuffed behind them, the colonel’s two detectives sat in the faltering light from the headlamps. Fedoras were lying about, coat buttons were missing, blood was splashed everywhere, that ear of Serge Deiss’s now so cold the bleeding had all but stopped, though it still must hurt like hell.
He would open the suitcase and see what they’d done, would say, ‘If you’ve harmed her, I really will have to leave you to freeze to death. Then I’ll come back to remove the bracelets and let the car go off the road so as to make it look like an accident.’
They’d been helping themselves to her cigarettes. Sick with apprehension, he turned to look at them.
Alarmed, Deiss shouted, ‘Kohler, be reasonable.’
‘Why should I? What did you have her doing? Watching the street for you?’
‘And the comings and goings at that bookshop.’
He would pick up a truncheon with each hand, would simply ask, ‘For how long?’
‘Kohler, listen. Back off, will you?’ said Paulus shrilly and spitting blood.
‘Look, I want an answer. Don’t force me to use these.’
It was Deiss who yelled, ‘Only since you and St-Cyr got off the train with her but why did Rasche ask for the two of you? He had to have a reason, didn’t he?’
‘A man who walks over corpses,**** Kohler,’ said Paulus, his left eye now closed. ‘One who doesn’t want autopsies done?’
They’d get Kohler going now, thought Deiss. ‘He finds that secretary of his missing on a Saturday afternoon but doesn’t bother to look for her until the following Tuesday?’
‘Returns to the Karneval to open that box he had made for her and sits with her for hours, when another suicide turns up? Finally calls Paris?’ said Paulus.
‘Doesn’t want those French POWs to be taken to the quarry camp. Is afraid of what they’ll reveal under reinforced interrogation,’ shouted Deiss.
‘There has to be a reason,’ managed Paulus, having to spit out a tooth.
‘Ask yourself why that colonel of yours didn’t leave it at a suicide, Kohler?’ said Deiss. ‘Ask why he had to claim it was murder. What could he possibly have hoped to gain?’
‘Rasche has a daughter at the University of Strassburg in Clermont-Ferrand,’ said Paulus.
‘The daughter he had by Yvonne Eva Ellemann, now Lutze,’ said Deiss.
‘Maybe the Detektiv should ask himself what Frau Elleman-Lutze hopes most to hide, Serge?’ asked Paulus.
‘No request for the Sippenforscher at the Office of Racial Affairs? No check back through the ancestors as is required by law?’
‘Three generations at least, isn’t it, Serge, before the Sippenbuch can be given if clean?’
The record book laying out a family’s lineage to prove it Aryan. They had worked it all out.
‘That of the daughter too, Kohler,’ said Hervé Paulus. ‘Those students and their professors at the University of Strassburg in Clermont-Ferrand are a hotbed of trouble the Gestapo there are most anxious to stamp out.’
This was true enough and they’d known it too.
‘Is Geneviève Rasche-Lutze one of the Mischlinge?’ taunted Deiss.
The mixed offspring of a Jew and a non-Jew.
‘Bad for the colonel if true, Serge,’ said Paulus. ‘Guilty of racial disgrace which can only lead to a court-martial.’
But that fire at Colmar’s town hall during the Blitzkrieg had put all of the records up in smoke. These two couldn’t prove a thing and neither could Löwe Schrijen, but these days did that really matter, and why should Schrijen feel he had to prove anything unless, of course, he had damned well found out what that daughter of his and her friends had really been up to?
‘Don’t leave us, Kohler. Bitte, there are wolves,’ managed Deiss, the one with the bullfrog neck.
‘Ach, don’t worry. The Generaldirektor will take care of you both, not only for failing to soften me up as ordered, but for drawing attention to him he can’t afford. Not with friends like the Gauleiter Wagner, and with a son in the SS at Natzweiler-Struthof and a daughter who is chairperson of this and that and one hell of a lot else. Just jump up and down. Then I can tell him you won’t freeze to death.’
It wasn’t far. From the smokehouse, they would soon enough find, came an aroma that was hard to resist, from the stoves in the house, the perfume of seasoned beech. Schrijenhaus, Löweshaus or whatever Schrijen called it, was at the end of the road among spruce and pine and not like many in Alsace, not one of a cluster, but isolated. Half-timbered, one storey and an attic, it had a railed, narrow porch under the overhang of a steeply pitched and stepped roof across which moonlight, having broken fee of layered cloud, shone.
The house was at least a hundred years old. Nothing ostentatious, thought Kohler. Just solid comfort and tradition.
Down over the vineyards which crowded close, lay the Plain of the Rhine Valley, and well to the southeast, the carnival, the Kastenwald and Louis. To the west and here, too, at their edge, were the Vosges and a route through to France if one had the stamina and guts, and wasn’t the isolation perfect? No dogs had challenged him and that was a puzzle. No lights shone but that was normal these days. Schrijen’s black Mercedes had been parked in the drive shed next to the stables, but there’d been no sign of the tourer. Had the daughter gone out to the Karneval?
Most of the help would live a short distance away at the farmstead, but there’d been no dogs there either and no one had come out, though they must have heard the car. Had Schrijen given them a night off, they taking one of the horse-drawn sleighs into Kaysersberg or Kientzheim? Only the geese had given warning of this Kripo. Was Schrijen deliberately keeping the dogs close until needed?
That, too, was a worry. Behind the floor-to-ceiling black-out drape that hung just inside the front door, the entrance foyer was crowded with boots, coats, skis, trout rods, creels and hip-waders. Had Rasche been a frequent visitor, his secretary with him?
Anoraks, mittens, scarves, gloves and bleus de travail were here with rucksacks too. Father, son and daughter—it was almost too easy to tell them apart. Of all, the daughter’s was the most worn and it seemed clear enough that she must spend time alone hiking in the forest, but then he found, under an anorak, another worn rucksack, and yet another and had to ask, Renée Ekkehard and Victoria Bödicker?
No one had thought to remove them. Pruning clippers lay on a side table. Bundles of vine cuttings were in the wood box near the tiled stove, a freshened stack of sawmill slab-waste too. A man, then, who liked his comforts yet liked to get back to the land.
The corridor wasn’t long but in semidarkness with here and there a rack of staghorn beneath which were framed photos of past hunts, past harvests, too, les vendanges, and through the far door, light enough to see a cabinet with shotguns and sporting rifles under the shaggy head of a magnificent wild boar whose curved tusks gave warnings of their own.
Leather club chairs sat about the ample room with scattered throw rugs. Oil paintings of standing and reclining nudes hung between superb racks of antlers. Voluptuous girls; turn of the century—from a brothel? he wondered.
A plain, dark green, long-necked bottle of the Riesling had been uncorked. Two glasses lay on the pewter tray next to it, the one on its side and broken at the stem, with droplets of blood nearby on the cloth, and a spill of wine.
Another bottle, one of those pale, washed-out blue unlabelled things the French kept and had used for centuries was not on the tray. An eau-de-vie or marc and reminder of that wagon at the Karneval.
Schrijen, who had been watching him all this time, was sitting behind a plain wooden table, cigar smoke in the air and one old dog, an arthritic Doberman pinscher, on the floor at his feet, its sad eyes taking in this Kripo, only to then glance questioningly up at its master.
‘Well, Kohler, you continue to surprise me. Those two idiots won’t freeze to death, will they?
‘Generaldirektor …’
‘Löwe. Please grant me that. I’m at home here.’
‘Your daughter’s in trouble. Those two were told by you to follow her.’
‘To keep her out of it.’
‘Safe from herself?’
‘If necessary.’
Lead soldiers filled a nearby vitrine: shelf after shelf of the Kaiser’s uhlans—his cavalry armed with lances and a reputation that had, by 1914, made them legendary. Dragoons too, and horse-drawn artillery. ‘The Crown Prince Wilhelm’s hussars also,’ said Kohler. ‘The Death’s Head, though the name’s since been borrowed, hasn’t it?’ And hadn’t Sophie Schrijen had one of them in that desk drawer of her brother’s?
Its place in the vitrine had yet to be refilled and was glaringly empty, though it could have been filled so easily before this war. A symbol, then. A constant reminder?
‘Those were mine and then my son’s,’ said Schrijen, still watching him closely. ‘Alain was always allowed the only key, but one day lost it.’
‘Your daughter …’
Kohler had been through that desk. ‘Told the boy it must be in the secret hiding place he kept from all eyes but his own and that he had simply forgotten where that was.’
‘And the Death’s Head colonel that’s missing? She took it, didn’t she?’
Kohler could think what he liked, but would never learn that the boy had come upon his sister and one of the girls that had then been employed as housemaids, that Alain had seen the two timidly kissing in one of the barns, and had informed on them as was only right and proper. Nor would he learn that the girl had been taught a lesson she would never forget and had been sent to live with distant relatives. ‘That lead soldier was never found. Miata,’ he said softly to the Doberman. ‘It’s all right, dearest. Herr Kohler will put away the pistol he took from one of those men. You’ve no need to fret.’
‘Miata?’
‘It’s a Japanese family name. A visiting delegation of textile manufacturers from Kyoto came through early in ’29 when my friend here was newborn. One of them was quite taken with her and kept calling her Miata-san, Fräulein Miata. The name stuck, which showed how intelligent was my choice. Try as I did, though, I couldn’t get her to come unless I said Miata. She can hardly walk now. I should have her put down but can’t bring myself to arrange it. Alain needed our Alsatians at the quarry. Magnificent animals Miata tolerated but barely, but what can one do these days? I couldn’t refuse the boy.’
And no dogs to cause a fuss if deserters were being moved through to the west but he’d better be sure of it. ‘You’ve no hounds?’
Kohler indicated the boar’s head but did he think him a fool to have missed the trend of thought? ‘Not at present. We still hunt, of course. Now why don’t you take off that greatcoat and sit down? You’re making Miata nervous. That’s bad for her heart.’
There was an enlarged photograph of the daughter at the age of ten. A funeral, the kid grief-stricken, skinny and trying hard not to cry. The blonde hair had been braided into a diadem, the photo a constant reminder of her new and vastly increased responsibilities to the family. Nearby there was another of her in a shift, mortified and trying hard to smile while standing with her back up against the wall, her height being measured by some doctor who had his hands on her. The brother, in his underpants, was laughing at her.
There was a map of the vineyards, the house, farmstead and forest, including streams and a lake. Hunting trails were clearly marked, as were the locations of three Jagdstande, three hides.
‘Archery,’ said Kohler.
He and St-Cyr must have discovered that too. ‘My Sophie took it up for relaxation.’
‘As did Renée Ekkehard and Victoria Bödicker?’
‘Kohler, what have those men who were helping them been up to?’
‘When we know, we’ll tell you.’
‘Ach, don’t try my patience. Prisoner 220374 was sentenced to death by his comrades. Haven’t I a right to know the reason and you a duty to tell me?’
‘There are two glasses on that tray, Generaldirektor, and we both need answers. Where is she?’
‘My Sophie? Available as always. Now look …’
‘No, you look. My partner and I believe Renée Ekkehard was drugged and then hanged, and maybe we’ve a good idea who did it and why, and maybe we don’t, but before I say anything further, who have you sent to that Karneval to take care of Louis?’
Such concern was touching, and hadn’t Paris’s Gestapo warned of it? ‘No one, mein Lieber. Why should I trouble myself when there are others who desperately want silence?’
‘Colonel Rasche?’
Deiss and Paulus had at least accomplished something. ‘I think you and that partner of yours will discover that suddenly our Otto regrets entirely having asked for you, and that he has much to hide and knows others are now fully aware of this and will use it if necessary.’
They really were at each other’s throats. ‘Is Werner Lutze with him?’
‘His Oberfeldwebel, his constant companion, the one who takes care of so much? Now sit, please. Have a shot of our schnapps. Sophie … Sophie, mein kleiner Liebling,’ he called out. ‘There is no need for you to find refreshed bandages and iodine. Herr Kohler can’t possibly have cut himself on that barbed wire as Lagerfeldwebel Dorsche has insisted, but bring a little snack for our guest. The Hiriwursch—pork and beef sausage I smoke myself, Kohler. The Schiffala also, the pork shoulder with the hash potatoes. My cook, one of the farm’s women, is always most generous. Some sauerkraut too, Sophie, and the Zewelewai, an onion flan. Coffee afterward and strong. He looks hungry and probably is.’
They were at the door of the wagon and St-Cyr knew there was no stopping them. Torch in hand, Rasche entered in what would have been a shower of glass had the mirror not been caught. ‘KOHLER … WHERE IS KOHLER?’ he demanded. Oberfeldwebel Lutze was right behind him, a Schmeisser crooked in his good arm.
‘Taken.’
‘SCHRIJEN?’
‘Apparently.’
‘Werner, those two must have come for him.’
‘Your detectives,’ said St-Cyr. ‘I had no chance to stop them. Neither of us were armed.’
‘Why was Eugène Thomas sentenced to death by the others? Come, come, don’t waste my time!’
‘We’re not certain. Hermann and I really haven’t had much of a chance to …’
‘Do you think I’m a fool? What did Kohler find in that cage of theirs? Did Dorsche miss something?’
‘This, I think, and these.’
A carving and a wad of wet newspaper. ‘Anything else?’
‘Are they not enough, Colonel?’
‘That bead of solder?’
‘When and if Hermann and I are able to …’
‘Kaysersberg,’ muttered Rasche, but would Kohler have been forced to tell Diess and Paulus everything? ‘What’s all the rest of this rubbish?’
The bits and pieces were indicated. ‘Evidence, Colonel. My pockets always seem to carry a bankroll of it just as did those of your second victim.’
‘Werner, close the door. Let’s hear what this one has to say.’
Rasche nudged the glossy peak of his cap up and let his dark blue eyes flick over everything, missing nothing now. ‘Renée Ekkehard, Colonel. You lied to us. You knew she was coming out here on that Saturday because you had telephoned the Fräulein Schrijen to arrange a ride for the girl.’
Mirrors tossed her reflection back and forth, distorting her even more hideously, thought Rasche. They made the eagle and swastika on his cap expand only to quickly contract and fold in on itself as he set the torch down on the coffin lid and took out his pipe and tobacco pouch, then found his matches.
‘That telephone call, Colonel …’
‘I was detained. Something had come up.’
‘What, exactly?’
‘We had learned that Alain Schrijen was to arrive unexpectedly on the early afternoon train. As Kommandant, I’m not without my sources. Stationmaster Krencker and I often go fishing.’
‘And?’
‘As I had some business to discuss with the boy but had said I would drive his fiancée out to the Karneval, I then had to find her a lift. The Fräulein Schrijen said it would be no problem, that the firm had a lorry in the garage. She then apologized for any inconvenience she might have caused by her not being able to go there herself as planned.’
And what would Renée have whispered had she been alive? wondered St-Cyr: You see not only how he gets around things, Inspector, but how he has emphasized who really was responsible. Aren’t boy, fiancée, lorry and planned all well chosen? ‘And this business you had with the Untersturmführer-SS Schrijen, Colonel?’
‘The Gauleiter Wagner, myself and the Generaldirektor Schrijen are to officiate at the opening ceremonies of the Winterhilfswerk fund-raiser on Saturday, 6 March, at 1000 hours. Kommandant Zill and Schutzhaftlagerführer Kramer were also to have been included but through some oversight on the Fräulein Ekkehard’s part, the pressures of work perhaps, an invitation had not been sent. Wanting to correct the matter, I was going to ask the Untersturmführer-SS Schrijen to personally carry my formal invitation and apology to the quarry camp on his return the following day, Sunday, that is, 31 January.’
Clearly the colonel is no ordinary adversary, is he, Inspector? she would have whispered. ‘Wanting to correct the matter,’ and avoid any unpleasantness? ‘Boy,’ now becomes Untersturmführer-SS but the colonel doesn’t blink an eye at your having corrected him? He even reminds you of the date of leaving so that you will think what you must. Werner is watching everything too, isn’t he? Ready at a moment’s notice and ever loyal but would he do things to protect his colonel that even that one hadn’t sanctioned? Isn’t this what you are now wondering?
St-Cyr was still waiting for more, thought Rasche, and had let a hand come to rest on the edge of the verdammt box, forcing him to look at her again; therefore it would have to be said plainly. ‘Unfortunately I was detained and when I got to the station, the Untersturmführer-SS had already left in his car. The Fräulein Schrijen was, however, still waiting for a bus and only too glad to take the invitation to her brother. I was able to offer her a lift back to the Works but she declined. A matter of some errands in town, I think. I then returned to my office at the Polizeikommandantur.’
Step by step, Inspector, the Mademoiselle Ekkehard would have said, thought St-Cyr, but notice, please, how he has deliberately left out any mention of Sophie’s being greatly distressed and nearly in tears. Alain suddenly arrives and there has to be a change of plan? She has to give up the use of his car, must drive it to the station when it’s badly needed, has to then send me to the carnival instead and has to wait for a bus not knowing what must happen?
And now a hand-delivered message to Natzweiler-Struthof when of course the Polizeikommandantur’s telex or telephone would have done just as well. ‘Colonel, by your own admission, you didn’t bother to search for the Fräulein Ekkehard until the following Tuesday. Forgive the persistence, but I find that hard to believe.’
There must be no hesitation. ‘I sent Werner out to look for her.’
‘When?’
‘At about 1600 hours on that Saturday, the thirtieth of last month.’
And again he’s taking care to give you the times, Inspector, and emphasize the date, but didn’t Sophie tell you that the lorry from the Works returned here at about 5.00 and waited a good half-hour, its driver repeatedly honking the horn? Bien sûr, Herr Lutze could have left by then, but please don’t forget that a man like the colonel is inevitably one step ahead. ‘And yet you told us that Herr Lutze and his wife were quietly asking around town if anyone had seen her?’
Momentary shadows from the lantern kept flickering over Renée’s reflection, St-Cyr knowing only too well that this could not be missed. ‘I had my reasons. I knew Werner hadn’t been able to find her. Instead … Ach, Oberfeldwebel Lutze, be so good as to enlighten him.’
You see how he’ll play it every way he can, Inspector, the girl would have whispered. He’ll bounce it off his sergeant, off the mirrors, too, that you’ve forced him to watch. Now a hard, if distorted glance at them, now a deep frown as some further thought comes, but notice, please, that he has completely forgotten to pack and light that pipe of his. And Werner? you ask. Werner feels his colonel is taking care of things but wonders why you made a point of saying neither yourself nor Herr Kohler had been armed. Were your weapons still at the house, in that grip of yours? he wonders. One that Frau Lutze must surely have gone through.
‘Ach, come, come, Werner, tell him.’
‘Jawhol, Oberst. The Untersturmführer’s tourer had been parked well up among the ruins here and next to this wagon’s House of Mirrors. I felt that he might have trouble getting the car out, as the snow then was quite deep, and that he must have been in a hurry, since he is usually very careful with such things.’
Careful with that car, Inspector, she seemed to ask, or with murder?
‘He had gone into the woods after her,’ said Lutze, watching him closely. ‘On foot, Inspector, the girl on skis.’
It has to be asked, she seemed to whisper. Please don’t avoid it, Inspector. ‘And how, precisely, did you get here yourself?’
‘Our police van was the only spare vehicle,’ sighed Rasche. ‘From the woods Renée would have heard and most probably seen it, Alain Schrijen also.’
‘And what was she to have thought, Colonel. Die Grüne Minna***** and immediate arrest?’
‘Ach, I admit, in retrospect, that I should have been more circumspect and given Werner the use of my own vehicle, one that girl would easily have recognized and come to without being alarmed.’
‘Of arrest, Colonel, but for what, please?’
‘For what I have since been forced to believe they might well have been up to.’
‘They?’
‘Those three girls to whom I had granted so much.’
‘And is that why you removed her toque and replaced it with her beret?’
‘Which the little fool had in her pocket.’
Sophie Schrijen, those grey-blue eyes of hers wary, had braided her hair as in the photo of herself at the age of ten. There had been recent tears—Kohler was certain of this—and just as certainly she was still extremely upset and terrified, probably, of what was to come and of what this father of hers could well do. After all, it wasn’t every day that two detectives were hired to beat another into submission, not every day a man you had worked with and trusted to fix up Karneval things deliberately climbed the wire to end his life.
Resilient she might normally have to be, but now she was like the proverbial eggs in a résistante’s carrier-basket as her bicycle was stopped at a control and her papers demanded.
The dress and full white linen apron were much like those of Yvonne Lutze, the neck-chain with its cross the same as when he had first encountered her. Even Miata sensed that she was far from self-assured and sorrowfully watched her as slices of oven-warm Kugelhupf gave off their aroma.
Stopping her from leaving, Kohler noticed the bandaged cut the broken wine glass had caused, then the shock the nearness of him brought, and as it passed through her, the instant of panic and revulsion.
‘What is it?’ she demanded.
‘Ach, forgive me, but I want to get something clear. What was so important at the Works that you had to send Renée Ekkehard out to the Karneval instead of yourself?’
‘Eugène was experiencing difficulties with one of the dye batches. One can’t shut down a Works like ours. It stops for nothing.’
‘And the problem?’
‘The strike-offs—swatches of coloured cloth Eugène had done. He couldn’t get any of them to match the shade Raymond had recommended. Dress fabrics are sometimes not easy.’
‘Printed patterns, Kohler, for summer wear.’
‘For next year’s season in Berlin, Vati. Why not tell him that?’
‘Liebling …’
‘The depth of colour wasn’t clean, Inspector, nor bright enough. Sharp outlines are necessary, otherwise the pattern becomes blurred. You can’t have a dye that bleeds. Consistency across larger areas—the blotches we call them—is also critical.’
Realizing that her cheeks had reddened under his scrutiny, she caught a breath. ‘We use synthetic dyes. Ciba-Geigy, Durand and Huguenin. They’re in Basel—others, too, when we can get them. I did go to the railway station to pick up some we were having sent from a supplier, but that didn’t take more than an hour. Eugène and I then worked on things until well after 5.00 that afternoon. 6.00 probably.’
‘While Renée …’
She winced, could not have avoided it. ‘Look, I don’t know who killed her or why. How could I?’
But still feel you could have been the victim yourself. Herr Kohler didn’t say this. Instead, he asked, ‘Would Victoria Bödicker?’
‘Have killed her? Ach, I meant to say, have known who did? I can’t see how. I telephoned the shop to ask if she would go out there but Victoria said that she couldn’t. Frau Oberkircher, her neighbour, was away and couldn’t fill in for her. A customer was coming to collect a book. An SS major.’
It had sounded so futile, felt Sophie. Herr Kohler would demand the name of the major and the title of the book.
‘Her brother-in-law’s funeral,’ she heard him saying of Frau Oberkircher.
‘I … I had to ask Renée to go. There wasn’t anyone else I could turn to.’
‘Couldn’t it have waited until the following day?’
That Sunday. She must force herself not to glance at Vati, must try to be calm and self-assured. ‘We had a deadline to meet with the Karneval, and still have, Inspector. As it is, not everything we need will be ready.’
‘The Jeu de massacre?’
Why had he chosen it? ‘That and the shooting galleries, the Hall of Mirrors also, and Wheel of Fortune.’
‘The Bottle Fish?’
The look she gave was swift. ‘That too, and … and the Ring Toss.’
‘Liebling, I know this is all very unsettling for you,’ interjected Schrijen, ‘but could Colonel Rasche’s secretary have been involved in something?’
‘Something illegal, Father? What, please?’
He’d say it gently, thought Schrijen, would go on as if Sophie hadn’t known a thing and would use gestures to soften the impact. ‘She took things into the Arbeitslager, Sophie. Only little things, of course. Bits of string, carpenter’s nails, buttons, bread from time to time and cigarettes. It was foolish of her, but …’
‘Of this I know nothing, Vati. Is Lagerfeldwebel Dorsche trying to blame me for something I could not possibly have had any connection with?’
‘Not at all, dearest.’
‘Then did Victoria give her things to take in there for her, since she didn’t have a pass to the Works? Well, did she?’
‘Your friends, Sophie …’
‘They were not my friends! They were associates. People with whom I had to work.’
‘Yes, yes, of course. Perhaps it is, though, that Herr Kohler can enlighten us further. One murder, if indeed it really was, and we’ll never know, will we, unless Kommandant Rasche agrees to an autopsy, which I very much doubt.’
And one suicide, Vati? wondered Sophie, but he went on with, ‘Now another death for the colonel to explain in his weekly reports to Berlin and to Kommandant Zill at Natzweiler-Struthof, Kohler. So again I must ask, what were the men of that combine up to? Blood on your hand and yet no cut across its back or palm? Blood from Prisoner 220374’s mouth, I think.’
What had he coughed up, eh? snorted Kohler silently, and just what had Schrijen said to this daughter of his to make her so wary? ‘Blood and brains, Generaldirektor. I needed a moment to myself. That’s why I left Dorsche and went into the barracks block washhouse to clean myself up.’
‘Where there was a crowd of men.’
And so much for his having a moment to himself, thought Sophie. ‘Eugène and the others weren’t up to anything, Vati. If they had been, he would have told me.’
‘But took his own life instead, meine Liebe?’
‘He had no reason to.’
Mein Gott, but she could be tough when needed, felt Kohler, only to hear Schrijen ask, ‘Another of your associates, Sophie? Isn’t it true that you spent a lot of time in his company?’
‘I had to! Alain would have done the same had he not been away.’
‘Ach, that is so, of course. Before he volunteered to join the services, Kohler, my son kept in close consultation with the lab, myself also, as I still do. Always it is the lab that has to get things right before production commences.’
‘Raymond Maillotte was our fabric designer and test weaver, Vati. Where are we to find another? We’ve orders to fill well into next year. Where will we find another Eugène?’
Gut, the child had come through. ‘I’ll see to it. I’ll put in a call to Gauleiter Wagner who will understand and get on to Berlin for us. A sweep of the Gauleiter Saukel’s foreign workers. Somewhere we’ll find replacements. For now we have a little time, ten days until the current run is finished. By then they’ll be here.
‘Now, Kohler, since the colonel’s two detectives have yet to arrive on my doorstep, why not bring them in from the cold.’
‘They’re warm enough in your smokehouse, probably, but I’ll go and have a look if you like.’
‘You do that and I’ll build up the fire.’