Eleven

 

It was Tarnera who noticed the new spirit in the village. Something had happened to the place. It had been obvious for some time that one or two people had begun to have stirrings in their minds. Now it was as if they were all engaged in a vast conspiracy.

For safety the word had been passed round that the Germans were no longer to be talked to, in case some hint of what was in their minds was dropped. Even Hössenfelder, the orderly from the château, was discouraged from helping at the farm.

Like everyone else, Tarnera guessed that they were on the brink of something tremendous. It was deep into May now and he was well aware that for Germany events had reached the top of a steep slope down into the darkness and were already on the move again. It was clear the tide had turned and that eventually they were going to lose the war. The U-boats had been beaten and the Luftwaffe was broken. The Russians had smashed the Wehrmacht in the East, and even in the Pacific and Burma the allies were beginning to sweep everything before them.

Then they heard that Cassino, which had been holding up the allied armies in Italy, had fallen and it didn’t escape Tarnera’s notice that the place wasn’t just another stronghold but part of the battle for the Italian capital.

‘In case you haven’t realised it, Fritzi,’ he said to Klein-Wuttig, ‘we’ve just entered on a new phase.’

Busy at the table, Klein-Wuttig looked up. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Rome will fall before long.’

‘Rubbish.’

‘I’m glad you think so. I even hope you’re right.’

‘There’s nothing to fear.’ Klein-Wuttig was armoured by his faith. ‘Hitler ist der Sieg. The Führer is Victory itself.’

Tarnera laughed. ‘Fritzi, you’re an incurable optimist. You know the current joke in Berlin: They stuck a notice outside an old folk’s home – “Closed. Due to Call-up”. Men of sixty-five are being called into the Volkssturm, Fritzi. Mind you, they say you’re exempt if you can prove you have a father serving at the front.’

Klein-Wuttig’s expression was frozen on his face. ‘You think the war’s a joke, Tarnera, don’t you?’

‘If I didn’t I’d have cut my throat long since! Fritzi, the Russians are heading now for Kiev.’

‘Der Endsieg wird kommen. Final victory will be ours, never fear.’

‘Fritzi–’ Tarnera sighed ‘–those airy sunlit homes they promised us; they’re all over the Reich now – thanks to the RAF. And do you remember the days when we were going to sweep up the British Isles with a vacuum cleaner? What happened to that? If a referendum were held now to end the war, there’d be a hundred and twenty per cent vote, the odd twenty per cent voting twice. You’re beginning to regard the war as an end in itself, irrespective of whether it can be won. Alles klappt. Everything’s ticking over. We haven’t lost, so everything’s fine. Anybody with half an eye can see the way things are going. That nonsense about one folk, one Reich one Führer only papers over the cracks. There’s no direction any more. The Party stalwarts have boozed away what grey matter they had.’

‘The Führer will make things come right.’

Klein-Wuttig spoke doggedly and Tarnera threw up his hands. ‘Oh, God, Fritzi, all this Hitler worship’s just Catholicism without Christ!’

Klein-Wuttig stared stonily at him then he gathered up his belt and cap and strode to the door. As he opened it, he turned and jerked out his arm defiantly. ‘Heil Hitler,’ he shouted.

‘Oh, go to the devil!’

As Klein-Wuttig disappeared, Klemens arrived.

‘What was all that about?’ he demanded.

‘Only Fritzi insisting that we can’t lose the war.’

Klemens frowned. ‘Of course we can’t,’ he said. ‘We started it and now we’re stuck with it and we might as well enjoy it because the peace will be terrible.’ As he tossed down his hat and whip, he stood for a moment, staring at a picture near the door. It showed a village street and seemed to have been painted entirely in the left-over browns and greens of a one-armed house decorator.

He frowned and gestured at it. ‘Those paintings we’re after,’ he said. ‘They couldn’t have painted over them, could they? I mean, could that be one? I’ve heard of that sort of thing being done by shady dealers. They scrape it off afterwards or something.’

Tarnera smiled. ‘I’ve checked, Herr Oberst. That paint’s years old. You’d never scrape it off.’

Klemens scowled. He also had begun to notice the new spirit in the village and it worried him because sabotage was rife all over France. Despite everything, the French were still managing to urinate into the petrol tanks of lorries, and concrete bastions along the coast were said to be rotten because French labourers had discovered that sugar dropped into a concrete mixer formed calcium saccharate which robbed the concrete of its strength.

None of this, of course, applied to the district of Néry-St Seigneur-Rolandpoint, which had been stiff with Germans since 1940, but it didn’t mean that the villagers weren’t scheming. He was no fool and was as conscious as Tarnera that time was running out. Apolitical himself, he was none the less aware that when Armageddon came, it would be well worth his while to have stacked away against the future everything he could find, and it bothered him that he was sitting on a set of art treasures that no one had yet thought to remove.

‘That inventory I asked for,’ he said. ‘Is it ready?’

Tarnera fished in his briefcase and produced a thick folio of papers, which he passed over together with a signal flimsy. ‘I’ve also tracked down Colonel Marx,’ he said. ‘That’s his reply.’

Klemens snatched at the signal and stared at it. ‘So much for that damned old woman!’ he said. ‘Well, I’ve got something too! Let’s have the old witch in.’

Because of the warmer weather, the Baronne had discarded her husband’s sheepskin jacket but she still looked cold. Klemens gestured to a chair and she sat in it as straight-backed as if it were a bed of nails. Klemens started off gently. ‘We’re not receiving the co-operation we’re entitled to, madame,’ he said.

‘You can hardly expect it,’ the Baronne snapped. ‘Unless, of course, you were to decide to leave, and then we’d willingly help you pack.’

Klemens smacked the table with his hand. ‘You realise that as maire you could be held hostage for the good behaviour of the village,’ he said. ‘How would you like that?’

The Baronne was quite unmoved. ‘At my age, it wouldn’t bother me at all. My only regret would be that I wouldn’t be here to see you all trailing back to Germany in defeat.’

Klemens scowled. She was so old his threats were meaningless. He changed the subject. ‘The pictures,’ he said.

The old woman looked at him blankly. ‘Which pictures?’

Klemens reddened. ‘You know damned well which pictures, madame!’ He waved the telegraph flimsy. ‘It’s taken a little while to check your statement that they’d been stolen because, as you know, we expect the British and the Americans to try to land in France and, due to the allied bombing and the disruption of communications, Colonel Marx has taken some tracking down. However, we have tracked him down, and he states in his message that the paintings were here when he left.’

The old woman pulled a face. ‘Perhaps he took them himself and doesn’t want anyone to know.’

Klemens scowled, knowing she despised him. ‘That’s not all, madame!’ His voice rose as he began to lose his temper. ‘What you don’t perhaps realise is that paintings have to have something called provenance. Do you know what provenance is?’

The Baronne shrugged and Klemens smiled. ‘Provenance, my dear lady,’ he said, ‘means pedigree. I’ve been in touch with General Dannhüber, who’s an expert, and he was kind enough to provide a catalogue of the paintings and artefacts in this house. It’s an old one, of course, produced before the war, but it lists nineteen pictures as well as a number of etchings and several sketches. With this list I’ve contacted art dealers in Munich, and General von Stülpnagel in Paris put me in touch with one or two of your compatriots who are more friendly to us than you are. I now have descriptions of every one of these paintings. In some cases, even photographs. I now know all there is to know about them and when I find them–’

‘When,’ the Baronne reminded him.

Klemens ignored the comment, ‘–when I find them, I shall know if they’re the ones I’m looking for. They’re all listed here, madame: Five Greuzes – five, madame! – a Nattier, a Watteau, a Lancret, a Fragonard, a Vigée Lebrun, a Corot, a Troyon, a Daubigny, a Monet, a Kucharski, a Prud’hon, a Desvosges, a Quantin and a Truat. There’s also a small pencil drawing by Rembrandt, engravings by Legros, a red chalk sketch on green paper attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, a folio of pencil drawings of rocks by Dali, a charcoal drawing of washerwomen by Degas, and water colours by Dufy and Orissa. To say nothing of framed chromos of one of your family at Abd el Kader and the defence of the legation at Peking by another of them; drawings by Détaille and de Neuville, three Nîmes vases, a set of Rouen plates, a Chippendale mirror, four Louis XIII chairs, a surveyor’s compass used in America during some war against the British, an 18-carat gold fob watch, English, French and American antique toys and automata, and various items of jewellery on red velvet in flat glass cases.’ He turned to Tarnera. ‘Have you seen any jewellery in flat glass cases, Tarnera?’

‘None, Herr Oberst.’

Klemens laid a folder on the table and leaned forward, his hands on the desk, to stare with narrowed eyes at the Baronne.

‘This catalogue, madame, was issued by your husband. It bears out what I’ve been told.’ He opened a page. ‘For instance: the Lebrun. Two metres by one and a half.’ He flipped the page. ‘The Monet. Two and a half by two. These are big paintings. Where are they hidden?’

The old woman’s face remained blank. ‘I’ve told you. They were stolen.’

‘They’re in this house!’ Klemens’ bottled-up frustration came out in a shout.

The Baronne didn’t even blink. ‘Not to my knowledge.’

‘We’ll search the place!’

The thin shoulders lifted in a shrug and the Baronne stood up. ‘Then, monsieur, I suggest you get on with it.’

Klemens stared after her as she closed the door. ‘Tarnera,’ he said, his voice bitter. ‘She knows those damned paintings are here! But she also knows they’re sufficiently safe for her to challenge us to find them. Very well, we’ll show her what we’re made of. Turn the place inside out. And, to make sure that while you’re in one room they’re not passing something through the ceiling to the next, we’ll have the whole damn lot of them out on the gravel in front.’

Half an hour later, they were all out on the drive – the Baronne, Euphrasie, Joseph, and the cook. It took another half-hour to find Psichari, the gardener. He was in the lavatory at the back of the house, enjoying a smoke, and being half crazy, refused to leave until he’d finished. With them all finally standing in an indignant group by the great front door, Unteroffizier Schäffer prepared to send his men through the house.

‘What are we searching for, Herr Oberst?’ he asked.

‘Canvases. Paintings. They may be flat. They may be rolled.’

‘Not the ones on the walls, Herr Oberst?’

‘No, you idiot! Search every room. Every cupboard. Every carpet. Every mattress.’

An hour later it began to rain and the indignant Baronne demanded to be allowed inside. Unwillingly, Klemens moved them into the hall. They were there until late afternoon by which time Schäffer’s men had to admit defeat.

‘The damn things must be somewhere,’ Klemens scowled. ‘They wouldn’t destroy them out of spite.’

‘They just might, Herr Oberst,’ Tarnera pointed out.

‘Have they searched the place properly?’

‘From top to bottom.’

‘Attics?’

‘Every one. I checked.’

Klemens stamped up and down, his hands clamped behind his back. ‘They were here when Colonel Marx was here,’ he insisted doggedly. ‘He even says that if he’d been on his way home, he might have helped himself to one or two.’

‘Perhaps they’re in the village,’ Klein-Wuttig said.

‘Very well,’ Klemens slapped his hand down on the table. ‘Tomorrow we search the place with a fine-toothed comb.’

 

The following morning, Klein-Wuttig and his men surrounded the village. At first there was a certain amount of panic, but when one of the soldiers actually handled papers with a list of the members of Reinach’s réseau and did no more than glance at it, it dawned on them that the Germans weren’t looking for weapons and they began to enjoy themselves.

In Reinach’s house, there was great excitement when Schäffer gave a shout and Klein-Wuttig was inside the house in a moment, yelling for Klemens.

Klemens was waiting near the church, alongside a rusting iron crucifix that clawed at the sky next to the noticeboard announcing the times of the masses. Behind him was the cemetery, at the end of a small dusty path which had been stirred by the feet of countless mourners and the hooves of generations of scrawny horses. It was desolate and full of frugal crosses of cast-iron, beadwork wreaths and marble slabs supporting yellowing photographs under glass. Among the stonework, the edgings of granite chips, weeds and lachrymose angels, there was a large family vault inscribed ‘Famille St Angéac-Brieuc de Frager’. It was giving Klemens the creeps, and he was glad to go into action as Klein-Wuttig called.

Schäffer had discovered an ancient frame, its gilt blackened with age, from which the canvas had been cut. A further search had produced from under a bedroom rug a canvas of a man and a woman.

Klemens stared at it joyously. ‘Now we’re getting somewhere.’ He glanced at his list and Tarnera saw him frown. ‘I’ve no mention here of a painting of a man and a woman,’ he said. ‘You’re sure that’s a man and a woman.’

‘One of them has a bust and the other a beard, Herr Oberst,’ Tarnera pointed out.

Klemens scowled and looked again at the painting. It was a deep brown in colour. ‘What’s its pedigree, do you think?’ he asked.

‘By amateur out of dud, I imagine,’ Tarnera said. ‘If that’s an old master, Herr Oberst, I’m the Führer’s dog.’

‘Fetch Reinach in.’

As the carpenter was brought in, his face blank and stupid, Klemens jerked a hand at the canvas. ‘Where did you get that?’ he snapped.

‘From my father, monsieur.’

Klemens turned to Tarnera. ‘Get him!’

Reinach’s eyebrows lifted. ‘You’ll have a job, monsieur. He’s in Heaven. He died in 1936.’

‘Then what the devil was he doing with the Baronne’s painting?’

Reinach’s eyebrows shot up again. ‘That doesn’t belong to the Baronne, monsieur! It was painted in 1934 by my brother who was taken prisoner in 1940. It’s supposed to be my parents, only he was never very good at painting and his colours were always muddy.’

Klemens glared. ‘If it’s of no value,’ he yelled, ‘what was it doing under the carpet? And why did you cut it from the frame?’

‘Because we heard, monsieur, that you were collecting things to take back to Germany. It hasn’t any value, but it means a lot to my family.’

Klemens shoved him aside and stamped out.

Two houses further along, Dréo’s one-legged son appeared holding a small picture of a battle. It showed French troops in red trousers and képis driving off a group of Prussian soldiers in spiked helmets with a great deal of slaughter. It was a very bad painting. ‘It shows our people defeating your people north of Tours in 1871,’ he said to Schäffer, his face serious. ‘You can have it for fifty francs.’

In the street Klemens conferred with Klein-Wuttig and Tarnera. ‘They’re shifting the stuff along,’ he said, ‘from one house to the other. Split your men up. One lot to start at the east, the other at the west. Where they meet, that’s where the pictures will be.’

But they weren’t, though they searched the decaying environs of the church, the bell tower, the barns and sheds, and even broke open the de Frager vault because one of Schäffer’s men said he thought he detected the marks of a crowbar on the stone. All they got for their trouble was a vituperative complaint from the Baronne, spat into their faces with all the venom she could muster.

‘Didn’t you find anything at all?’ Klemens asked wearily. ‘A few hidden bottles of wine,’ Tarnera said. ‘An odd bottle of brandy. No guns. No paintings. No jewellery.’