They were now alone in the judge’s flat. ‘Oona, Louis,’ said Hermann. ‘The boys on your street. Your boys, mine too.’
They had perhaps a day, didn’t even know where any of the Agence Vidocq lived. Bien sûr, Delaroche must have been told by Oberg to take Giselle, and when Garnier and Quevillon had failed—if they really had—Oona had been necessary.
‘Let me have that Sûreté blunderbuss of yours and the spares. Don’t argue.’
Fingers were impatiently snapped. Clearing things away on the judge’s coffee table, Hermann broke the Lebel and emptied it and the ‘brand-new’ packet of 11 mm, black-powder 1873s whose cartridges rolled about until silent. Spreading them, he muttered, ‘Verdigris. No wonder you people lost this war.’
It wasn’t a moment in which to disagree. It was 0422 hours Sunday, 14 February 1943 and they had until 1000 hours Monday. Shoving most of the cartridges to one side, Hermann chose six to reload and that … why that, of course, left only five as spares. A folded handkerchief was produced, a girl’s, a woman’s—clean, white, ironed and decorated with a diligent bouquet of beginner’s needlework.
‘Lupins,’ he said, smoothing it out. ‘Oona dropped this in the foyer of Madame Guillaumet’s building. She left it for me, Louis. Deliberately.’
It was the handkerchief her two children had presented to her on her birthday, days before the Luftwaffe’s Stukas had repeatedly bombed Rotterdam on 14 May 1940. ‘You’re in love with her and deeply, I think.’
‘Just don’t relay that to Giselle if we find her. If, Louis. Germaine de Brisac let it slip that there had been two involved in the kidnapping of Adrienne Guillaumet outside the École Centrale. One to wait with the bicycle taxi and, though she didn’t say it, to later commit that assault, and one to call out Adrienne’s name as classes were let out and to lead her through the crowd to that very taxi.’
‘Two at place de l’Opéra and now another two, one of which was common to both.’
‘That one having a wedge of shoulders and big hands. She also made a point of telling me that Delaroche could call on some of the municipal sewer workers.’
‘Most of whom are decent, hardworking men who consider themselves a breed apart, but the Church of Saint-Nicholas des Champs is very near to the École Centrale and opposite it, one of the main entrances to the sewer system. Boats can be hired …’
‘Men can come up and go down at will and later rob a stamp store, eh? Two and two and two, Louis, the one down under the streets gathering a little mud while the other one was attacking Adrienne Guillaumet in the passage de la Trinité. Old soldiers, admit it!’
‘With another to undertake the Drouant mugging, having first assisted with the taxi theft. Veterans, yes, it’s quite possible, but I don’t think the two who isolated the owner of Take Me in place de l’Opéra’s street urinal and then stole that taxi were sewer workers. They’d have had their waterproofed suits and hats and have had no need of using fish-oil margarine.’
‘Unless wanting to keep their identities to themselves.’
‘Walter uses the Agence Vidocq from time to time, not knowing they’ve been working against him and are on their own agenda.’
‘But does Oberg now know what they’ve been up to?’
‘Has he offered them absolution if they get rid of us?’
‘The Fräulein Remer now being nothing but insurance, Louis, Standartenführer Langbehn having been told only so much?’
‘And the agency absolutely confident nothing will be pinned on them, they having the protection of the SS, as does the judge.’
Suzette Dunand heard them leave. Clutching Teddy, she had run to the door, had stood before the two detectives in her nightdress, ashamed, terrified and embarrassed until Herr Kohler had said, ‘Please don’t cry. We’re here to help.’
They hadn’t stayed more than a few minutes. She had told them everything she could about Jeannot Raymond, most especially that he was the one who always handled the recovery of stolen property and was often away from the office for days on end.
‘The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, Hermann,’ the Sûreté had said. ‘Jeannot Raymond is the one who hunts down the owners of that property and then the agence help themselves.’
‘Flats are kept for clients who need a place to stay,’ she had said.
‘Four, five—how many?’ the one called St-Cyr had asked, they both dismayed to find she didn’t even know where any of them were other than this one and the one downstairs.
Admit it, said Teddy. You couldn’t stop thinking about your date with this Jeannot Raymond. Nine o’clock this morning, Suzette? Isn’t that a little early if you are then to be taken to lunch?
‘The Chinese gate. I … I had thought perhaps a walk afterwards through the Institut National d’Agronomie Coloniale.’
And now? he demanded.
‘I was wrong. He … he was going to kill me.’
Hiking the hem of her nightdress, she blew her nose and wiped her eyes, must be brave, must do exactly as the detectives had told her.
Fortunately her tears hadn’t splashed the laissez-passer and sauf-conduit Herr Kohler had given her, he glancing at the one from the Sûreté for further agreement before filling in her name and the town of Dreux, the chief inspector saying, ‘Hurry, Hermann,’ but had a part of them been lost? Had the passes been for someone else?
‘Pack a few things, mademoiselle,’ he had said. ‘A small suitcase. Carry a shopping bag with whatever food you can gather for the journey and a little extra to help out at home—not too much, though. Bringing food into Paris is illegal and contrary to the rationing, so taking it out with all the shortages will only raise eyebrows.’
‘Remember that you haven’t been home since the Defeat,’ Herr Kohler had said, ‘and that you’re very worried about your mother and how she’s managing without your dear papa.’
‘Make sure you emphasize he’s a prisoner of war and an excellent garage mechanic and that he has found lots of work in the camp and is pleased. Tell them how many brothers and sisters you have. Has your mother a medal?’
‘The silver,’ she had said, their advice coming so fast it had been as if spoken by one.
‘Ah, bon, there are eight of them, Hermann. Be brave, mademoiselle. Open your suitcase only when asked by the control. Try to remember to say, “Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann,” especially if he’s a private. They like it when a little Deutsch is used and they’ve been flattered.’
‘Put in some extra underwear,’ Herr Kohler had said. ‘If he fingers it, don’t worry.’
‘Just look away, as if embarrassed.’
‘If he steals it, let him. Underwear is in short supply at home and is valued most.’
And then? asked Teddy as the bottle of cognac Herr Kohler had brought from the flat downstairs and reluctantly parted with went into the shopping bag.
‘You and the cognac will be seen, Teddy. If they take the one, I’m to say nothing.’
And if they should also take me? he asked.
‘I will kiss you good-bye, as the friend you’ve been, and will walk on through the control to the train. I won’t be able to look back. I mustn’t. I’m not to hurry, am to walk steadily away and then step up into the carriage.’
She was to leave the flat well before nine and to take the earliest possible train, was to give herself time but not too much. ‘You don’t want to be noticed hanging around the station,’ the one from the Sûreté had said. ‘Act naturally. You’ve the necessary papers. Be positive about them. They’re good and have come from the very best of sources.’
‘Don’t even think of them as being false,’ Herr Kohler had said and given her five hundred francs in small bills. ‘I’d give you more but we don’t want it attracting attention. Split it up. Keep only two hundred in your handbag, the rest in pockets but not those of your overcoat.’
St-Cyr had said to make sure she bought a return ticket; Herr Kohler, that she was to use her looks if necessary but wasn’t to go so far as to hesitantly touch her throat or plead with her eyes. ‘Those people on the wickets can be bastards,’ he had said. ‘Some of them are in the pay of les Allemands and can, by pushing a little button under the counter or giving some other signal, summon help.’
‘For cash,’ St-Cyr had said. ‘Yours especially.’
At 5.00 a.m., 4.00 the old, the rue Laurence Savart began to stir but they had no time to watch it come alive even though parked and sharing a cigarette outside the house at Number 3. ‘We had to do it, Louis. We had no other choice.’
Oona and Giselle, if the latter was alive and if the two could be rescued, wouldn’t get their laissez-passers and sauf-conduits, nor would Gabrielle and her son or even Hermann. Antoine Courbet and Dédé Labelle would leave the city via the Gare Saint-Lazare to begin what would be the longest journey of their lives, to the farm of Madame Courbet’s sister. Bien sûr, their destination was near Rouen, which was being bombed repeatedly by the RAF. There’d be incendiaries and high explosives. Certainly the boys would be fascinated but …
A drag was taken, the cigarette returned. ‘Admit it, Louis. They couldn’t have stayed here.’
The boys were to ‘help with the spring planting’ and had been ‘excused from school.’
Hervé Desrochers and Guy Vachon would travel south to a farm near Dijon, they leaving the city via the Gare de Lyon and bearing a similar, officially handwritten letter that had been signed by the Kommandant von Gross-Paris and forged by Hermann. And didn’t the Occupier love to have his pieces of paper, and didn’t one hope that Von Schaumburg wouldn’t discover the forgery and that no one would question its not having been written on official letterhead?
That the boys might never come back was one thing, that they were only ten years old, another, and that they had had to grow up overnight, yet another.
‘Suzette Dunand, Hermann. That girl still worries me because she knows far too much.’
Though she hadn’t been able to tell them much about Jeannot Raymond, what she had said had confirmed their worst fears. In October 1940 there had been at least 150,000 Jewish people living and working in Paris, nearly half of all those in the country. Only a quarter had been of French descent and citizens, but with the continued arrests and deportations, that total had since plummeted to around seventy thousand.
Elsewhere in the country, it was approximately the same. The pecking order that had been initiated at Vichy’s request had focused first on the immigrants, especially those who had been refugees from the Reich, but now it was directed at those who were left, the French citizens, many of whom had been veterans of that other war, as had many of the immigrants.
Citizen or not, Jewish or not, for there were also many other unfortunates, résistants among them, it hadn’t and wouldn’t matter to the ERR’s Aktion-M squads, and yes, Jeannot Raymond and the Agence Vidocq were not the only ones helping themselves. ‘But as flats and houses here in the city are emptied, Hermann, Delaroche must be having his pick of them.’
‘Which he then furnishes to his taste and at absolutely no cost or very little.’
‘Thereby setting aside an ever-growing store of wealth few if any will know about.’
‘And when the Occupier has to leave?’ asked Hermann.
The cigarette was taken, ash flicked to one side. ‘The agence’s targeting of delinquent POW wives will put them in favour with the sympathies of many.’
‘Admit it, Delaroche will claim they’ve been secretly working for the Résistance.’
‘Having just as secretly betrayed many of them.’
Hermann took a deep drag. ‘And enough, probably, to have silenced all disclaimers.’
‘But Walter can’t know of their having targeted those wives and fiancées.’
‘And Oona could be in any of those flats or houses, Louis.’
‘Ah, oui, oui, but isn’t it more likely that she has to be held somewhere that is absolutely secure and where no one, no concierge no matter how much in the pay or how loyal to the cause, will question her having been brought there or say anything of it later?’
‘The Lévitan furniture store in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin is huge. There’ll be guards and not just a few of them, dogs, too.’
And 0900 hours at the Chinese gate would come soon enough and couldn’t be missed.
Birdcages, dishes, pots, pans, sheets, beds, blankets, furniture of all kinds … ‘Clocks, Louis. Jésus, merde alors, look at them!’
They went tick-tock, tick-tock, rang if off the hour or were silent, but didn’t just line the many aisles in regiments. Categorized, sorted as to species, they were stacked on shelves to the once white-painted, embossed tin-plate sheathing of a ceiling that fell to pseudo–Louis XIV plaster cornices before descending to a floor whose stained tongue-and-groove was store-worn.
‘Philippe had needed a crib,’ Louis had said as they’d sat a moment in the car—it had just been one of those dumb things a partner would say before taking the plunge, any plunge into the unknown. ‘Marianne wanted me to make the choice for her, but I had to work, so I made her take care of it.’
Had Louis the sudden need to get it all off his chest? That boy, that little son of his, had grown and had then to have a bed, a chest of drawers and, perhaps, if the money could be found, a little table and chair of his own. Always there had been money problems, the wages for defying death next to nothing, just like in the army. ‘But again she wouldn’t choose them herself, Hermann. That wouldn’t have been right of her, she had felt, like so many of our women, and had insisted that, as “head of the household” I must make that decision for her.’
This war, this Occupation, had made a lot of them change their minds about that and change them quickly. Louis had ordered the stuff from the Lévitan, spring of 1940, but would the memories and the loss of that second wife and their little boy haunt him to his dying day?
They had entered the Lévitan through a door next to the loading docks, had smelled the rank soot from the Gare de l’Est and heard its locomotives beyond the usual high wire fence all such places were supposed to have. There’d not been a light anywhere out there in the darkness of that railway yard and but a stone’s throw away, nor had there been anyone on that door, the place apparently wide open yet that couldn’t be, but they’d gone up the stairs anyway so as to keep out of sight.
Kitchen stoves were also on this third floor and Kohler had to wonder at the logic of this since most were of cast iron and heavy. Sinks, washbasins, bathtubs, bidets, mirrored medicine cabinets and toilets were here, too, as were iceboxes and tennis rackets, ironing boards, steamer trunks and suitcases still with their travel stickers, ladies’ hats, fur coats, dresses, suits, corsets …
‘Candlesticks,’ breathed Louis. ‘God has deserted us, Hermann. There are thousands of them.’
The escalators, installed in the thirties but now frozen in time to save power, were to be used simply as staircases of another kind. ‘Oona, if she’s here, must be in the cellars.’
Lamps were on the fourth floor and seen to the horizon’s walls, wireless set, too, and gramophones with heaps of black Bakelite recordings.
‘Mendelssohn,’ breathed Louis. ‘The Violin Concerto—it’s magnificent. A Deutsche Grammophon. Nothing but the finest.’
Though Mendelssohn was a definite no-no at home and even here in France.
Sheet music, tied in half-metre-thick bundles, made its ramparts but there were no pianos. Those had been taken by the Sonderstab Musik and were stored elsewhere in three large warehouses just to the north of the city. Numbered, certainly—how the hell else were they to have kept track of them, seeing as their legs, bearing those same numbers, had been removed to make the carcasses easier to ship?
But there were piano benches, delivered here by mistake. A teenager’s note, when found, said only, and in her native Deutsch:
Herr Kaufmann, if we are to meet in secret even for coffee and the cakes you love so much, my father would never forgive me. You would then be out of a necessary employment and would, in addition to your extremely modest fee, no longer receive the generous tips that are his great pleasure to present to you when such progress has been deemed entirely evident, even to ears that cannot, and never could, to my knowledge, hold a tune or keep the voice on key, due entirely, it must be admitted, to the noises of the foundry he owns and tirelessly manages so that my younger sister and myself may experience the finer things of life from such a talented instructor as your kind and diligent self.
A mouthful.
‘Let’s go downstairs, Hermann. Maybe they’re waiting for us there.’
Clothing racks held men’s suits. Shoes, sorted from their mountains, were piled on shelves. Some had even been polished.
Lists of the contents of each house or flat would have been made, sometimes by the owners if time allowed, most often by the ERR with Germanic thoroughness though done most likely by a French employee and overseer, since virtually all of the Aktion-M boys were locals, and sure, they had needed the jobs just like Max Auger.
Jewellery, china, books—whole libraries of them—desks, family photos by the spill and heap, were accompanied by military decorations, and why hadn’t Colonel Delaroche simply taken a Légion d’honneur ribbon from here? Too Jewish, too tainted, or simply, unlike Max, goods that had best not be taken unless paid for, even if only a little and especially as one had a hold on a fellow veteran who would have had to agree to letting him have the use of his own?
Personal things even letters and tax records, the lot had been gathered. First the fist or truncheons at the door, then the arrest and the stick-on seals to tidy things unless the neighbours were able to dash in and grab whatever they could, but this would have happened anywhere, Kohler knew. The Netherlands was still seeing it, Poland too, even the Channel Islands. Wherever people were arrested and deported.
‘Legalized, officially sanctioned robbery, Hermann.’
‘And then murder, Louis. We both know those “work camps” they’re being sent to aren’t just for work.’
Once sorted, catalogued, cleaned and repaired if necessary, the loot would be packed up and either sent to the Reich and the Eastern Territories, or to another depot for later transhipment.
Deliberately they had avoided the ground floor, had chosen instead to make the briefest of reconnaissances up here first. Seen from the head of one of the escalators, though, the ground floor had its riches—billions of francs worth of loot. Aghast at the display, Kohler hesitated. Savonnerie and Aubusson carpets were spread out, Turkish ones, too, and Persian. Tapestries—Flemish, Beauvais and Aubusson—were there, paintings … family portraits by the look, hundreds and hundreds of them on the floor, piled and leaning against each other while above them hung the richly carved, water-gilded empty frames of still others whose subjects had been cut away and trashed—they must have been—even those dating back a century or two or three.
‘Louis …’ he managed.
‘Hermann,’ came the reply.
Descending a few more steps, he again paused. There were aisles and aisles, a maze in which the contents of the grandes salles and salons of châteaux, maisons de maître, hôtels particuliers and appartements had been emptied and some of them hastily reassembled, though totally depopulated. Among the contents there were gorgeous bouquets and splashes of flowers that, even when seen from such a distance, still took the breath away. ‘Henri Fantin-Latour, Hermann. Pierre-Joseph Redouté …’
Egyptian alabaster vases, Greek sculptures, Boulle armoires, vitrines full of enamelled silver and/or gold music boxes, snuffboxes, jewellery boxes, Augsburg silver tureens and silver-gilt pilgrim bottles, Sèvres porcelain and Meissen figurines, Régence mirrors, lacquered Chinese screens and those whose many-coloured silk birds seemed to fly up into the electric light from above …
‘And no one about, Hermann. Not a soul but ourselves.’
‘It isn’t right, Louis.’
‘Are we not expected?’
Could they be so lucky? ‘What’s that smell?’
There wasn’t time to answer. Gallé glass figurines, vases and bowls, with Daum, Lalique and other pieces made a floor-to-ceiling rainbow through which stared the silent ebony and teakwood faces of African sculptures, absolutely exquisite works beyond which, they having reached the ground floor at last to be hidden by its contents, were rock-crystal, Baccarat and Venetian chandeliers that hung as if from a gallows or lay draped over Louis XIV and XV settees and sofas, or prostrate at the feet.
‘Velum-bound illuminated Renaissance books of hours with their calendar pages from the early 1500s, Hermann. Old-Master sketches … Pour l’amour de Dieu, how the hell could Pétain or anyone else in Vichy or Berlin have sanctioned such robbery?’
‘Coins, Louis. Drawers and drawers of Roman coins.’
‘Used postage stamps?’
‘Most certainly.’ And this was only a portion of the loot that was constantly being gathered. Roll-topped desks and others, still with their fountain pens and inkstands, waited in long rows, their letters and account books still evident. ‘A marriage licence,’ said Louis. ‘The deed to a flat in Passy. Another in Auteuil.’
Swords, matched pairs of pistols in their velvet-lined cases, battle-axes … There was still no sound other than the careful passage of themselves, the time 5.57 a.m.
Bedroom suites gave the dressing tables of the once-wealthy, blonde hairs still clinging to a hairbrush and comb, a spill of rings and earrings as if but taken off and left frozen in time but scattered deliberately, for the piece and its chair and mirror couldn’t have been moved otherwise and brought here from wherever.
‘Set out again, Louis, even with the silk sheath of a nightdress so as to amuse and intrigue those who come to see what the Baron von Behr and the ERR are up to.’
That one and his British wife often did bring their after-dinner, after-theatre parties here and for just such a purpose and to sell items on the side. ‘Far too much is at stake for us to be allowed to interfere, Hermann.’
‘We’ll try talking to them anyway. We’ll lay out our cards and see what theirs are.’
‘What cards?’
They entered a ground-floor carpentry shop where pieces awaited further repairs, found wood shavings and sawdust in plenty, hardwoods of various kinds. Tapestries were awaiting further restoration in another room, laundry its ironing in yet another, carpets their cleaning in yet another.
‘And the stuff they use for packing, even the wood shavings, returned, Louis, to be used again and again.’
It wasn’t a brass gong that rang, nor some relic that had been brought back from the Far East, but a washtub that was being beaten furiously by a soup ladle. At once there was commotion from underfoot—shouting, grumbling, moaning, swearing in Yiddish, Hebrew, Spanish, Polish, German, French, Russian and Czech—Hungarian too, until silence of a sort was restored, the shrieks of, ‘RAUS! RAUS! SCHNELL! ALLES!’ echoing. ‘ZUM APPELL!’ Roll-call, too, and then … then, ‘EINS, ZWEI, DREI …’
They took the back stairs down, the stench of toasted, burned, sour black bread and ersatz tea of boiled hay, weeds, roots and other things mingling with those of the washed, the still unwashed and the latrines.
The cellars were a prison. Timber-held wire mesh ran from the floor to a bricked and ogive ceiling, and in this fetid cage which stretched on and on, one hundred and fifty … two hundred souls slept on tiered, grey blanket-draped bunks whose mattresses leaked sawdust and wood shavings as the prisoners stood to greet the dim electric light of day by lining up to be counted and then given their breakfast.
Men, women, old, young, middle-aged mostly, some in the stiff, still heavy black woollen suits and broad-brimmed black felt hats of the Marais, many not, some of the men even wearing their yarmulkes, defying the guards to snatch them off.
A spatula-wad of stiff grey-white grease—margarine, verdammt—from a galvanized bucket, was being slapped on to each thick slab of black bread to be finger spread later on. The canteen trolley was one of the Wehrmacht’s mobile soup kitchens, but the three behind it were not in uniform, the one with the ham cheeks and gut of a big bass drum, the resident cook among his other tasks, and wasn’t it interesting that the sous-chef immediately beside him was also of medium height and built like a wedge whose big hands must have lost part of a fingernail?
‘Fish oil, Louis. If only Marie-Léon Barrault and Gaston Morel could see that cook and Adrienne Guillaumet, the one in the middle. Steal the taxi, collect the victim and take her to the passage de la Trinité while the big one heads for the Drouant.’
‘And the other one, the second of the sous-chefs, having called out her name as if to help her to that taxi, then sinks his fists into the mud.’
‘With a certain safe in mind and Au Philatéliste Savant not far a walk.’
‘And with time enough for the one in the middle to have come from the Trinité attack to make sure those stamps were recovered.’
Five Wehrmacht guards were behind them, two with shouldered Schmeissers, a sergeant, a Lagerfeldwebel, in charge. ‘It’s Sunday, Louis. They’ve toasted the bread as a little treat to make it taste better. They must have given the prisoners an extra hour of sleep.’
They didn’t talk, these sorters, shippers, needlewomen, laundresses, tailors, carpenters, furniture restorers and other artisans, some no doubt former Lévitan employees. Each awaited his or her turn until all the bunks but one were empty. ‘Oona …’
She was sitting on the edge of a lower bunk, was clutching herself tightly by the shoulders and rocking back and forth, had been badly beaten. ‘Hermann, don’t say anything.’
‘You to the right, Louis. I’ll go left. We’ll cut this lot loose and see what happens.’
‘Ah, merde, don’t be an idiot! They’ve nowhere else to go without a great deal of outside help and you know it. Aren’t concierges who look the other way in short supply? Aren’t flats that are now empty and might be used if a cooperative concierge could be found, too often having neighbours who would simply report such new occupants? Too many would be killed in any case, or wounded. Besides, they’re hungry.’
‘Don’t argue.’
‘Then listen to me. We’ve not been expected, not yet.’
‘Oona’s clothes are torn. Was she …’
Hermann couldn’t bring himself to say it, but Hubert Quevillon was standing to one side of the machine pistols and so was Flavien Garnier.
The first was amused by the roll call, the second couldn’t have cared less, but when seen through this mesh of wire and its crowd of faded yellow stars and grey-striped shirts and trousers on some, dresses of the same on others, it was enough.
‘A waterproofing compound, Louis, when there are raincoats, capes and boots in plenty in this place.’
‘Unlike Max Auger, they know enough not to take anything.’
‘Hubert Quevillon having been later told all the lurid details of Madame Guillaumet’s attack and that of the Drouant. If he’s raped Oona, I’ll kill him.’
‘That’s for the courts to decide and you know it.’
‘What courts? Hercule the Smasher’s? If we’re going down, we’re going down hard.’
‘Then be so good as to back me up.’
‘Remembering always that we’ve an appointment to keep at 0900 hours.’
The Bois de Vincennes, the Chinese gate. ‘Suzette Dunand, Hermann. Have we missed something we should have anticipated?’
The detectives, Suzette knew, had warned her not to get to the station too soon, but the waiting in this flat was terrible. Clothes that would be impossible to replace, would just have to be left. She was to take only a little and had been ready for hours, had told herself over and over again that if arrested, she must never reveal the identities of the detectives who had given her the false papers, must simply say she had purchased them on the black market, an additional crime, oh for sure, but one the police or the Germans might eagerly latch on to and overlook the other.
And the letter they will find in your handbag that is signed by Colonel Delaroche stating that you have been designated an essential worker and must not be taken for the Service du Travail Obligatoire? What will these arresting police or Germans do should they find it among your papers? asked Teddy.
‘They’ll telephone him. He … he’ll send someone for me or will come himself.’
With that dog of his?
‘Oui, but I can’t leave that letter, Teddy. It has to be with me at all times, otherwise …’
You’re crying again. Must you give yourself away so easily?
‘I’m sorry. I just can’t help it.’
Won’t the métro be crowded? Won’t we be jostled if the police or the Gestapo or the German soldiers don’t stop you first?
How could he do this to her? Everyone had to face a ridership that had gone from two million a day to nearly four million. Whenever people could, especially on Sundays, they packed the trains very early on to head out into the surrounding countryside to forage the farms for food, taking things to barter and, if successful, then risking arrest at the controls on return.
You’ll have trouble getting us a ticket, said Teddy spitefully.
‘The change,’ she gasped. ‘Ah, Sainte-Mère, I had forgotten.’ Exact fares were required. So scarce were small coins, the German soldiers always taking them away as souvenirs or simply forgetting them in a pocket, one now, and for nearly the past year and a half, had had to have the precise amount. The line-ups were terrible. ‘We’ll take the Concorde station. Oh for sure it will be crowded, but this can help us if necessary.’
Is it that we’ll have a need to hide? he demanded.
‘I … I don’t know. I’m just being careful. The number one, the Château de Vincennes–Porte Maillot Line from the Concorde runs straight out to the Bois de Vincennes. If someone is following us …’
He’ll think that’s where we’re going, but …
‘Will see what I’m carrying and think I’m taking a few things to my aunt and uncle, a little laundry also.’
Teddy just looked at her like he always did when wanting to tell her she was wrong.
‘We’ll get off at the Châtelet station. It’s one before the Hôtel de Ville. We’ll wait until the very last moment to step off the train, then catch a number four but … but take it only to the Gare Montparnasse station, walking up and over from there to its Gare du Maine Départ.’
Leaving him on the other train like in the films? A killer, Suzette? M. Jeannot Raymond and a girl who knows far too much about him and the Agence Vidocq?
‘We have to try. We can’t stay here.’
* * *
Torchlight fled urgently over the prisoners. Some were momentarily caught wolfing the last of their bread, others draining the rusty tins they used for mugs. It hit the tiers of bunks. Searching always, it fled along the corridor that surrounded the cage, casting wire-meshed shadows and settling at last on the main breaker box.
Fuses that would have been a stiff hand span in length, with thumb-sized copper contact bars protruding at each end and umpteen volts, were not easily pulled, especially if in darkness and haste.
‘And yet they have been,’ breathed Helmut Meyer.
‘Lagerfeldwebel,’ came the oft-excitable voice of Grenadier Willi Keppler. ‘There are no spares. They were always kept on top of the box but are no longer here.’
Keppler was the youngest of the men—barely nineteen—and eager, yet requiring almost constant attention. Meyer looked back along the corridor past the boy and then at the prisoners who were waiting. Schmeissers were being trained on them by Bochmann and Ullrich, so that was good, since those two, in their late forties but still looking like grandfathers, were the most able and could, one hoped, be entrusted with such reissued weapons.
Krass, having found his Mauser rifle, had fixed its bayonet in place and was standing at the ready next to the cell’s gate. That, too, was as it should be, though Krass was still far from being 100 percent. Russia had done things to each of them.
Steam billowed from the canteen trolley whose cook had carefully set his ladle aside to take up one of the long-bladed knives. Flavien Garnier and Hubert Quevillon were standing very still, the latter no longer amused but afraid he was about to be taken to task for what he’d done to the Dutch woman the two of them had brought in earlier.
‘Put the people back in the lock-up,’ Meyer heard himself calling out.
‘It’s the one we had you put in that cage,’ said Garnier, his voice carrying on the damp, cold air. ‘Kohler and St-Cyr have come for her.’
Had Garnier not liked his use of ‘people’ for the Juden? wondered Meyer. ‘Then take her out and give her to them.’
‘Ach, Lagerfeldwebel, we can’t do that,’ objected Garnier. ‘The Höherer SS …’
‘Orders are orders, my friend. Yours, mine, those of others. Sometimes they conflict and this is one of those times, since I have received none and merely agreed to your hasty and unusual request, coming as it did in the earliest of hours.’
‘We’ll take her with us. Just escort us to our car.’
‘Ach, there could be trouble. Aren’t these detectives you are concerned about armed?’
‘They won’t shoot at …’
‘Won’t return fire should we start it—not myself, you understand, but these men of mine? Certainly these boys haven’t seen the front in nearly a year but must I remind you that we are here in Paris to recover from battle fatigue? Can you not also understand that a posting such as this is highly valued and that they wouldn’t wish to lose such a cushy job even though one or more of them might be convinced to shoot, out of nervousness only, of course.’
Meyer was just pushing things, felt Garnier. ‘Let us take her, then, and leave.’
‘That would, under ordinary circumstances, be appropriate, but once locked up, always locked up until I have the order to release her.’
Ah, merde, the salaud! ‘Fifty thousand.’
‘Reichskassenscheine?’
‘If you wish them,’ said the Frenchman gruffly.
‘One hundred thousand of those to be split among my men, and a further one hundred thou’ for myself, for the expenses and unnecessary delays of production, which you will understand have to be reported in my log and perhaps even verbally explained.’
‘Two hundred thousand it is, then.’
‘And no trouble but if there should be …’
‘There won’t be.’
‘That woman, Herr Garnier. Was she raped by the one that is with you?’
‘Not raped. I stopped him.’
‘Caught him in the act, did you?’
‘But in time. Now listen, there won’t be any trouble.’
‘Because, my friend, these men of mine will not fire on those two detectives. The General von Schaumburg and others of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, who are our commanding officers, don’t exactly like what has been going on here at the Lévitan and elsewhere in the country they occupy and for whose order, and plundering, I must emphasize, they are ultimately responsible. Hence, it is best that myself and those under my command proceed with caution.’
‘Three hundred thousand.’
‘That is a little better but still I have ordered—Men, did you all hear this?’ he called out.
Like parrots, their replies came in rank by rank.
‘I have ordered them to withhold all fire once the prisoners are again locked up and the one you wish has been released into your custody.’
‘The Baron von …’
‘Behr? He will not want any of these beautiful things of his to be damaged by the thoughtlessness of an exchange of fire that need not have happened, especially as such a disturbance would most certainly bring further attention down on what he and the ERR have been up to, yourselves and others as well, I understand.’
Must everything have its price? swore Garnier silently. ‘Four hundred thousand.’
Eight million francs. ‘It’s a lot, Louis,’ whispered Kohler. ‘I’d no idea our boys were so corrupt.’
‘Of course you did, but can they be corrupted further?’
‘If offered the fuses they need?’
Like most big stores, the Lévitan had a pneumatic system for the cash, cheques and paperwork each floor had to send to the head office which was here at the back of the ground floor. Hermann had been going to feed the fuses into it for safekeeping when voices had been heard, thanks, no doubt, to one of the prisoners holding a portal open, or had it been the Lagerfeldwebel himself?
‘Garnier and Quevillon can’t be armed, Louis.’
Inevitably the Occupier was reluctant to arm even its most fanatically loyal supporters. The Agence Vidocq might work for Boemelburg and Oberg but that didn’t mean they had powers of arrest, even if hunting down résistants, and in any case, they could be armed on the spot, if felt necessary.
‘I’ll try to negotiate,’ said Hermann.
This wouldn’t go well, St-Cyr was certain, but the tube was blown into. ‘Achtung, achtung, Lagerfeldwebel. Kohler, Kripo, Paris-Central. Release Madame Van der Lynn and tell her we’re here. Garnier and Quevillon, and those three behind the trolley, are all under arrest. Lock them up and we’ll let the Kommandant von Gross-Paris know that good German boys have helped with their capture. He wants them, meine lieben Herren. Our orders come straight from him.’
‘And not from Gestapo Boemelburg?’ shouted Garnier, his voice muffled by distance.
‘From the chief also.’
‘But not from the Höherer SS Oberg who wants to be rid of the two of you.’
‘Eine kleine Mausefalle, eh?’
‘What does it matter, then, how that happens?’
Garnier had a point, but why would he waste time talking about it … ‘WATCH HIM, LAGERFELDWEBEL!’
The warning was too late. A burst from a Schmeisser raked the air, screams, shouts and commands pouring from the tube. ‘YOU, YOU AND YOU, INTO THE LOCKUP NOW. YOUR PISTOL, LAGERFELDWEBEL. VITE! VITE!’
‘AND IF I REFUSE.’
‘YOU WON’T!’
‘I might just as well.’
‘Idiot, no one need know. Just leave us to deal with those two and we’ll give you back your weapons.’
‘Bochmann, since you were foolish enough to have lost yours to this one, please go and release the prisoner into their custody.’
‘He snatched it away from me, Lagerfeldwebel. I wasn’t expecting …’
‘Yes, yes. It’s all right, Bochmann. We’ll do as we have to and deal with it later.’
‘Russia … They’ll send me back, Lagerfeldwebel.’
‘I know, but it can’t be helped. Kohler, the fuses, where are they?’
A sensible man. ‘Lying here on the former director’s desk. Let the prisoners go to their work stations and ask among them for someone to show you the way, if needed.’
Angry shouting followed, then silence, then a whispered, ‘Kohler, the woman has managed to run from them. Garnier and the others have taken our torches but have not, I think, yet found her.’
‘Louis, did you hear that?’
There was no answer. He had already left.
Crouched, half-hidden, St-Cyr eased the Lebel’s hammer fully back. Garnier and the others—the cook, his two helpers and Quevillon—weren’t just shining their torches into and along each aisle. They had spread out in a line, aisle by aisle, room display by display, and were crossing the ground floor in unison, moving inevitably towards the director’s office and Hermann, who might not yet know this but might anticipate it.
Garnier had dropped right back into being the sergeant he’d been in that other war. The cook and sous-chefs were also veterans—one had but to glance at them to see this. The former now carried a Schmeisser, the latter two had the Lagerfeldwebel’s Luger and the rifle.
Alone of them, Hubert Quevillon had been allocated the cook’s knife and relegated to the farthest aisle and immediately to Garnier’s right, that one still wanting to keep an eye on his subordinate or better still, to use that weakest link to advantage.
Looking down from the first floor at the head of the escalator he had somehow found in the dark, St-Cyr knew Garnier was being thorough. That one would use everything he could including, especially, that Oona had gone to ground.
Torchlight from the cook raced along the row of Boulle armoires but came back quickly to settle on one of them and then on another and another. One of the doors to this last hadn’t quite been closed. Had he found her?
Gingerly this cook teased it open. Caught in the mirror, the torchlight momentarily threw back its reflections. Blinking, he jabbed the muzzle of the Schmeisser deeply into the armoire. He didn’t call out, this man with the stomach of a barrel. Though one had at first felt he might have done, the soldier within him was too ingrained and brought only silence.
The line advanced. Its having all but reached the halfway point, Monsieur le Chef de Cuisine would have to hurry if he was to keep up. He showed no concern.
A torn piece of the lining from Oona’s woollen dress was fingered, the cook looking back along the aisle into darkness before teasing it out. He shone the light into the first of the vitrines whose curved glass doors and contents gave back their glints. He tried the next armoire but suddenly decided to retrace his steps.
He was counting off the armoires and when, at last, he came to the one next to where the torn fabric had been found, its doors were tightly shut. Perhaps it was a game to him, perhaps it had its sexual overtones. Harshly on the air came the pungency of the black bread he and the other two had toasted for the prisoners, burning, caramelizing what sugars there were in those round, hard loaves. The smell of too many Gauloises bleues was here, too, that of anise and sweat and garlic and pomade. A heavy man. A man of this Sûreté’s height and close now, very close. A little more … only a little and then the bracelets, that bit of cloth stuffed into the mouth to guarantee silence.
Oona’s right shoulder had been laid bare and had been badly bruised by Hubert Quevillon. There were bruises on the slender throat. Her lips had been split, her cheeks revealing where she’d been struck. She didn’t cry out but blinked at the light, dismay registering in those bluest of eyes, was all but bent double, would have difficulty getting out of the armoire.
‘Un moment,’ she softly said, the accent still there as it always would be, the memories of the Exodus from Rotterdam constantly with her, the loss, the endless days, weeks, months, years of never really knowing if her children would be found alive or in some hastily dug, unmarked grave a farmer might accidentally come upon years later.
She didn’t look past this cook who had found her. She stood before him, he shining the light over her. ‘My hair,’ she said. ‘It’s come loose. Please give me a moment, monsieur.’
The pudgy cheeks with their glazed-over nicks from a morning’s dull razor, their shadowed hairy moles and warts and aftershave, tightened. The Schmeisser lifted. Its muzzle was now pressed firmly against her stomach, Oona … Oona looking only at the cook, she watching that one’s eyes closely, too closely … Ah, merde, Hermann. HERMANN, ME, I DIDN’T REALIZE SHE WOULD WANT HIM TO KILL HER!
The silence hurt like hell, the sense of loss was total. Over and over again Kohler silently said, ‘Louis, why couldn’t you have waited?’ He knew Louis had gone to find Oona for him. Louis would do something like that. Louis.
The trickle of another rain of porcelain trailed itself away. Another large wedge of vitrine glass or mirror collapsed. The stench of cordite was all too evident, the ears still rang with the emptying of a Schmeisser’s box magazine, all thirty-two rounds at five hundred a minute.
There were no torchlights. These had instantly gone out with the firing. There’d been no shouts—nothing like that from Garnier or any of the others. Nor had there been a sound from below them, from the cellars.
Quevillon had pissed himself and was still quivering. The butcher knife and torch he’d held when found were lying on the floor at his feet, the urge to kill him all too …
‘Hubert?’ came a whisper at last from out of the surrounding darkness, calm, though Kohler nudged the back of Quevillon’s neck with the Walther P38’s muzzle.
‘FLAVIEN, WHAT HAS HAPPENED?’
Must Hubert be so shrill? thought Garnier with a snort. Blindly, gingerly he felt his way forward. He had to find a gap in all this rubbish, had to get through to Quevillon’s corridor before Kohler realized what was happening.
‘Flavien?’ hazarded one of the sous-chefs some distance from him.
Again there was no answer.
‘Eugène, are you okay?’ whispered that sous-chef. Kohler was certain of it. Had Louis found Oona? Had they both been killed?
Instinctively Garnier knew he had reached the far end of the aisle. There was that sense of openness, of being free of things. Stretching out his left arm, torch in that hand, Schmeisser in the other, he would take a silent, tentative step forward, would hurry yet chance nothing.
He had to make his way well around Hubert, couldn’t let Kohler realize this. Had it not been for that burst of firing, Kohler would have been taken, but now … now that Kripo must have Hubert. Eugène Roulleau would see that things weren’t good and would retrace his steps to find out what had happened to Claude Beaupré, the cook. Victor Denault would hold his position. Those three had often worked together but never at anything like this since Verdun.
The dressing table had its chair. Kohler nudged Quevillon into it. Louis wouldn’t have shot this agent privé or anyone else, not unless absolutely forced to in self-defence. Louis simply wasn’t like that.
A wrist was taken and pulled back behind the chair, the other one, too, Quevillon not objecting but waiting only for help—was that it, eh?
Metal clicked against metal and clicked again. Instantly Garnier knew the bracelets had been applied but Kohler wouldn’t hang around. And what of St-Cyr? he wondered.
Claude Beaupré must have found the woman, but had that Sûreté found the cook with her? It wasn’t like Claude to have emptied that gun. Had the finger of a dying man been jammed against its trigger? Had the woman been killed?
When he found Hubert, Garnier felt the silken nightdress that Kohler had crammed into that one’s mouth. He waited. Vehemently Hubert shook his head but had Kohler done the unexpected and hung around?
Only the soft fluttering of the silk as it moved in and out at its corners with each attempted whisper came to him. There was no other motion now, simply a stiffness in Hubert that gave warning enough.
Kohler … Where was he? Near, so near—watching through the darkness? Waiting for what—the torch to come on, the Schmeisser to be swung away from Hubert and what must be beyond him? Did Kohler actually believe he would spare that little shit?
A wash of perfume had been released on to the dressing table in front of Hubert, the flacon lying on its side but with the stopper deliberately set upright, the scent that of a woman of exceptional taste—was this what Kohler wanted to suggest? A Jewess? A wife, mother, daughter, mistress, the perfume still flooding from its little bottle?
The folding mirror under hand was in three panels. Hubert would see himself in it when the lights came on. Was this what Kohler had had in mind?
Blood, brains and bits of bone had been sprayed across the floor and over the nearby armoires and vitrines with their bullet-shattered doors and broken glass. It didn’t need a light for one to realize this, thought Eugène Roulleau. The cook had been hit in the back of the head at very close range, the slug racing around in there before tearing away much of the forehead and the eyes on exit.
One of the old Lebels, he silently swore. The fingers that had found the wound were wet and greasy. The Schmeisser Claude had held might have slid away but he doubted this and couldn’t recall having heard the clatter it should have made.
Merde, this wasn’t good. What the hell had the colonel got them into? Bien sûr, the odd job at night. It had been right of them to take care of those bitches, to teach them lessons their husbands couldn’t give. The schoolteacher, an officer’s wife, had been given hers hard, the stamps had then been recovered but …
There was no sign of St-Cyr, nor of the Dutch woman. With the Schmeisser’s burst there had been no sounds other than the terrified shriek she had given.
Wasn’t there an escalator nearby? Of course there was.
The muzzle of a Lebel has a signature all its own and much different from that of a Schmeisser or Luger. Sometimes warm, often cold, all are individuals when one has experienced such things, and all mean the same. Would a nod suffice?
The Luger was teased away. Roulleau waited. One didn’t think St-Cyr would shoot—Claude had been unavoidable and maybe the woman was dead and lying crumpled up in one of the armoires.
One would just have to try to duck aside or bend the knees on impact so as to soften the blow. Those old revolvers weighed a tonne. He’d have a king-sized lump.
Garnier heard the blow and the gasp it brought before the body collapsed. Stiffening, he looked away through the pitch-darkness towards where Claude Beaupré must have been, knew that Eugène Roulleau, the one who had raped the Guillaumet woman, had been taken, wanted to call out to Victor Denault of other such attacks and the robbery, with Roulleau, of Au Philatéliste Savant, but stopped himself, wanted to use the torch but found he couldn’t.
‘Gently,’ breathed Kohler, taking the Schmeisser from him. ‘We wouldn’t want to ruin anything else, now would we?’
In the cold, grey light of dawn they shared a cigarette but would it be their last? wondered Kohler. What they had uncovered wasn’t good. Too many in high places were being threatened; all would flock together, none would let two dumb Schweinebullen continue to interfere as they had most definitely. Jeannot Raymond might well arrive thinking to find Suzette Dunand waiting for him, but what of Delaroche, or of Sonja Remer and the Standartenführer Langbehn?
What of Oberg and even of von Behr, who wasn’t going to like the problem they had left on that Lévitan doorstep?
What of Judge Rouget and Vivienne, of the others too, that still shadowy and probably never-to-be-named group of men of influence who met at the Cercle de l’Union Interaliée to finance and advise Delaroche’s campaign of teaching POW wives and fiancées not to misbehave?
‘Too much is at stake, Hermann, too many are threatened.’
The cigarette was returned, the time, the moment, one of silence.
Caught between the Marne and the Seine, the Bois de Vincennes stretched bare branches up into the fog. Immediately beyond the Lac des Minimes, the keep, the donjon of the Château de Vincennes, all 52 metres (about 170 feet) of it could barely be seen, rising as it did higher and higher to a turret at each of the four corners, one of which carried a swastika every bit as huge as that atop the Eiffel Tower and not a breath of wind.
‘Six hundred, a thousand, Hermann. Two thousand? How many men garrison that stronghold?’
‘I’d worry about what the Wehrmacht have got stored under that keep.’
High explosives, artillery shells and ammunition.******** They had left Oona at the Hôtel-Dieu, had asked for Matron Aurore Aumont if possible and had said they’d be back soon, a lie of course but … ‘Oona’s the one for you, Hermann. Stop all this talk of a little place on the Costa del Sol with Giselle tending the bar and having babies Oona will take care of. You need her desperately and she needs you now more than ever.’
Hermann had held her all the way there. ‘And Giselle?’ he asked.
‘We’ll find her. I promise.’
‘I just wish I had your confidence.’
A Peugeot four-door sedan, dark green under the fog’s sweat, was parked outside 45 bis avenue de la Belle-Gabrielle not far from the Château’s keep but looking damned lonely as such would these days. Kohler used a fist to clear side windscreen. ‘Ah, Christ, Louis,’ he said, that sinking feeling in him all too evident. They should have had plenty of time to get in place but now had none.
A teddy bear, torn from Suzette Dunand’s grasp, lay on the backseat. On the floor there was a small suitcase, beside this, a shopping bag that had toppled over as its cognac bottle had been grabbed and taken away.
‘I should have seen it, Hermann. I knew we should have been more careful with that girl. This place … It’s freely open to the public only on Thursday afternoons from 1400 to 1600 hours. At all other times permission must be obtained.’
No casual visitors. ‘And now you tell me.’
Gilded fleurs-de-lis surmounted the tall, wrought-iron gates which, partly open, looked as if having been unlocked by an attendant who had had no wish to hang around and yet had had to do as bidden. Louis wasn’t happy about it. ‘Adrienne Guillaumet’s husband spent an extended tour of duty in Indochina. He and that father of his would be known to several other officers and men, one or more of whom could be involved.’
‘And there are veterans and veterans from that other war.’
‘I was here in 1920 when the memorial to the Annamite dead was consecrated. Brave men, good men. That temple, pagoda, dinh or communal house whose red tiled roofs so beautifully point towards heaven at their corners, is magnificent. There are rooms you wouldn’t expect, ironwood pillars—I counted at least sixty. Carvings that are exquisite, individual memorials to many of the fallen, altars to the gods of this and that, as well as to the Buddha.’
‘Let’s just hope we’re not too late.’
‘They can’t have let that girl live.’
There was no one waiting under the Chinese gate. How could there have been? One could wish for another time to cross this courtyard or walk through a garden which, in summer, would be tropical, not under blankets of last autumn’s leaves or wrapped in layers of burlap sacking, its monuments and statues to the fallen looking not just damned lonely but eerie in a silence that was broken only by the sound of gravel underfoot.
‘Hermann, there’s a passage that runs beside the temple. Two-metre-high sandstone bas-reliefs, copied from those in the avenue at Angkor Wat, line this. You’ll find them strange and frightening if coming upon them suddenly. Battle scenes from the holy books and epics of the Hindu. Remember, please, that not only will you be driven to feel as one with those men, you’ll be distracted. It can’t be helped, not after Verdun and all the rest we had to face in that other war.’
Everyone listened but no sound was heard, Suzette was certain. Dragons in dark, highly polished wood, their bulging eyes glistening as they watched her and waited, were coiled about the pillars or lying stretched along the rafters as if but awakened to what was happening and going to happen to her. Brightly painted terra-cotta unicorns tensely waited with phoenixes and turtles and they, too, seemed to listen and to watch. A polychrome Buddha waited, sitting on a lotus blossom. Spiralled incense coils—tall, open, white-ribbed cones—waited as they hung above the altar of this crowded shrine whose joss sticks the colonel had lit to smoulder constantly before the ash urns of the dead behind which were the framed photographs in glass of their owners, all of whom were in uniform.
Though there had been no sound that could have been heard, Bob had given warning and rigidly watched the block-printed red silk hangings that formed a screen over the doorway to this shrine. Colonel Delaroche had carefully redoubled his hold on the leash, Jeannot Raymond stood behind her, waiting too, as did the dead of that other war to whom relatives had burned further joss sticks before each photograph and had left offerings of money. Banknotes that had been printed in France in 1939 and never sent out, the colonel had said to Jeannot Raymond, who had caught her as she had hurried down the steps of the Concorde station and had forced her to come with him after first telephoning the colonel.
Bob didn’t move. Bob was very still, the two of them watching him and not herself, but would it matter, could it? Her hands were tied tightly behind her back. They had stuffed a kerchief into her mouth. The knife that would be used was still lying on the table before her and, among the reflections from its black lacquer, she could clearly see those of the incense coils and the dragons. ‘An old friend,’ Jeannot Raymond had said of that knife he had brought from Argentina. A gaucho’s knife with a long and shallow groove on either side and almost the whole length of the blade to hold and drain away the blood—her blood—once the throat had been slashed. He would simply pick it up, grab her by the hair, yank her head back and cut her throat as he’d done to others, she was certain of this. A knife whose blade was twenty centimetres long at least, two in width at the top and razor sharp, with a flattened, S-shaped guard, the handle beautifully embossed with what looked to be hammered, coppery-silver designs of crisscrossed triangles, curves, ridges and countless patterns.
‘One kills to feel it,’ Colonel Delaroche had said to her before Bob had stiffened. ‘Though the time of the gauchos was long ago, Jeannot employed only those who could prove they were descendants.’
‘The only honest human beings,’ that one had said. ‘Whenever possible they would use no other weapon than the facón each carried at the waist in its sheath, behind the back.’
Perhaps that knife weighed two hundred grams. Certainly it must be light for such a length. ‘The gavilán,’ he had said of it in Argentinian Spanish. ‘The balance has to be absolutely perfect. This one’s short by a good ten centimetres because I wanted it that way.’
Wanted it …
Bob fidgeted. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the smell of the burning joss, it was, Suzette was certain, that their scent reminded him of someone and that this then made him uneasy.
Again and again it came to them: the softest rustling—rats? wondered Kohler. Was it backup Delaroche had called in? Curtained doorways to niche memorials had been deliberately drawn, others left open. Bongs, gongs, drums, funeral biers, flags, bowls and urns—lieber Christus im Himmel, the bloody crap was bound to get in the way. A life-sized bronze Buddha sat behind the main altar, glowing softly in the ever-subdued light, waiting, it seemed, for something to happen. Others of wood were seated about in shades of dark varying to a light rose-amber, one with a hand raised in caution—was it caution—all eyes closed, the expressions beatific?
Merde, the rustling was stronger now. Louis hadn’t moved from where he was standing just inside the main entrance. Backlit by the growing light of day, he was a perfect target.
Now louder, the rustling put one on edge. Louis jabbed with the Lebel to indicate something off to the side in front of him. An altar. Joss sticks, bowls, urns, rows and rows of short strips of thin, reddish-purple paper with vertical lines of writing on them—hundreds and hundreds of these hung directly above one another from horizontally mounted bamboo rods, forming a panel maybe a metre-and-a-half wide by two in height. ‘Token offerings,’ he whispered, all but mouthing the words. Promises to the dead, for when times get better, wondered Kohler; items given, even with the shortages; good deeds done in the eternal quest to influence one’s karma?
The fog must be clearing. Air was moving through the dinh and, as each gust passed by, it lifted the loose ends of the paper offerings, one after another, row with row, and carried joss smoke up from behind a curtained door halfway along that side.
‘Don’t kill her, Colonel. Let’s talk.’
There was no answer.
Curtains of block-printed red silk were parted. ‘Colonel …’
‘Put that gun down, Kohler. Don’t and she dies,’ said Delaroche.
Jeannot Raymond had a knife like no other at her throat, the kid in tears.
The Walther P38 made its sound as it struck the glossy-black lacquer of the table. ‘Louis,’ he called, throwing the name over a shoulder, ‘the bastards have got me.’ There’d been nothing else he could have done. Nothing.
‘Join us, St-Cyr,’ called out Delaroche.
‘He must have gone to check that passage,’ offered Hermann.
‘Then we’ll wait. You two … Why couldn’t you have done what you were supposed to?’
‘Find the Trinité victim and then those of the Restaurant Drouant but nothing else, not the killing of Max Auger at the police academy and that of Élène Artur, or those of Noëlle Jourdan and her dear papa?’
‘Kohler, Kohler, why the hell couldn’t you simply have agreed to Herr Oberg’s request? A simple enough thing, a freshly baited little trap he still has in mind.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘False papers—did you really think Jeannot wouldn’t anticipate your trying to get this girl away from us? These are good, by the way. Proof enough of what you two are capable of. Boemelburg will have to see them.’
A little squeeze, was that it? ‘Don’t even bother, my fine one. I often pick them up on the black market to show the chief how the quality is always improving.’
‘Lie if you wish, but join us.’
‘With a French army MAS 1935A pointing at me? Eight of the 7.65 Long in the box and one up the spout? More than enough fire power to counter a Lebel 1873 with those old cartridges, eh, as this one must know?’
The shot when it came, filled the dinh with its sound. St-Cyr caught his chest, cried out, HERMANN! silently and said, a whisper, ‘Forgive me, mon vieux. I should have seen what they’d do because we gave them no other choice.’
Bob had been startled by the shot and had hunkered down beside that master of his, but now lifted woeful eyes as a hand was extended. Tentatively he sniffed at it, rejoiced, licked it eagerly and let his ears and chin be gently fondled.
‘Colonel, tell that son of a bitch to take that knife away from her throat and pull the gag before she chokes on her vomit.’
St-Cyr had still not come. ‘We also have the Van der Lynn woman, Kohler.’
‘Oona?’
That had startled Kohler. ‘Taken yesterday, but surely you were aware of this?’
The one with the knife hadn’t let up, but was it that these two still didn’t know what had happened at the Lévitan? In too much of a hurry to grab the girl and get here? No time, then. No time. ‘We looked for Oona but couldn’t find her, Colonel.’
Then why not ask where she was being held? Instead, Kohler warily glanced from Jeannot to himself as if uncertain of where things would now lead, and in the end, again reached out to Bob.
‘Believe me, Kohler, we really do have that woman of yours.’
‘Just the one—is that it?’
‘Unfortunately, yes.’
‘The passage de l’Hirondelle killing a mistake?’
‘Giselle le Roy will be found and will pay for it.’
His cape thrown back, that mustard-yellow scarf worn loose, Delaroche’s free hand was still wrapped tightly about Bob’s lead. Jeannot Raymond’s watchful grey eyes were expressionless, the black overcoat open, the black turtleneck pullover and dark grey pinstripe jacket, black hair and high if furrowed brow not those of a worried man but of one who knew exactly what he had to do and would, no matter what. Much taller than the girl, who was being held tightly from behind, his chin didn’t even touch the top of her blonde head. His reactions would be instinctive, no matter what. That blade would slice deeply as it was drawn from left to right, the girl’s eyes registering shock first, then panic, then loss as life faded. Could nothing be done?
‘The Lévitan, Colonel? Is that where you think you’ve got Oona?’
‘Salaud, what have you done?’
‘And not happy about it, eh?’
‘Must I remind you I’m the one with the gun? What went wrong?’
‘It being a Sunday, Colonel, the Komandant von Gross-Paris will still be at 26 avenue Raphaël, the villa the Wehrmacht requisitioned for him. Every morning it’s the horseback ride first in the Bois de Boulogne, rain, snow or shine. Then it’s breakfast. Always the café noir avec les croissants chauds and the plum jam, no other, then it’s off to work, but on Sundays, I have to tell you, he stays at that villa a little longer. Sundays are always his bath days. No one is ever allowed to bother him. I hated to interrupt but …’
There was still no sign of St-Cyr. ‘I’m waiting, Kohler.’
‘As is that “partner” of yours?’
‘Get on with it, damn you!’
‘Mais certainement. Not only was a Wehrmacht guard detail disarmed and their weapons used against them, their uniforms were disgraced. The only possible recourse, since I was under his orders, was to send the perpetrators, minus one, to the villa under arrest and with Lagerfeldwebel Meyer bearing a note from me detailing the reasons. You and that Agence Vidocq of yours are for it, my friend. Bonne chance.’
Kohler would have done it, as would St-Cyr. ‘Bob, stay. Bob, sit.’
‘He’s upset, Colonel. Missing Élène, are you, Bob? Got the scent of the joss she used to burn here?’
‘And what of these four?’ asked Delaroche, indicating the boys on Louis’s street, the photograph and its negative.
Had the son of a bitch thought to barter? ‘They’ve already left town.’
‘Using false papers? Really, you do surprise me, Kohler. They’ll be hounded down and brought back. The Höherer SS will be as definite about them as he will be about our showing up at that meeting tomorrow morning with the two of you and Giselle le Roy or Oona Van der Lynn. It won’t much matter which is used, will it?’
‘There are meetings and meetings, Colonel, papers and papers, uniforms and uniforms. This Occupier of yours has a thing about all of them, hasn’t he? Afraid of what Oberg’s going to do when he finds out what you and that agency have been up to behind his back and those of Von Schaumburg and Gestapo Boemelburg? Terrorizing the streets after dark? Making the Führer gnash his teeth over it? Killing people, raping some of them first and raping others, too? They did, Bob. They really did. That one with the knife held Élène down while this one …’
‘Kohler, don’t even bother to try to unsettle Jeannot. Vivienne insisted that we take care of Élène in the manner and place she wished. We did what we had to.’
Louis … what the hell was keeping Louis? ‘And with Max Auger?’
‘The boy had disobeyed me. An example had to be set.’
‘And the mistake in the passage de l’Hirondelle? Hobnailed boots again, Colonel? Ach, don’t you French ever throw anything out, especially after all the wars you’ve been in? I couldn’t get rid of mine fast enough. Rage, Colonel, that’s what it suggests to me. Uncontrollable rage, just as with Max and Élène. A very troubled mind that was, and still is, very afraid of what Oberg really will do when he hears about everything you’ve been up to behind his back. The Cercle de l’Union Interaliée and an inner circle who advise you on which targets to use as examples, Hercule the Smasher being one of those advisors? Men who gladly fed you far more names than Denise Rouget or Germaine de Brisac could ever have provided. POW wives and fiancées who needed lessons those bastards then financed.’
It would do no good to even say it, but … ‘Please try to understand that we’re fighting a war on the home front. Préfet Talbotte is one of that inner circle.’
‘Heroes are you, to veterans and others who believe it’s right to punish such women? Then listen hard. You’re a fence sitter and we can prove it. You work for the SS nailing résistants and others they and Von Behr and the ERR want, but at the same time you’ve been covering your ass for later, when the Occupier has to go home. Garnering support from as many as you can while filling vacated residences with the objets d’art and other things of the deported? Cash from double and triple billing the clients, from the sale of wanted names and from contract killings—that’s what Élène was, Bob. Cash you then hide in real estate and probably gold and diamonds, even though it’s illegal for you or anyone else to buy and hold these last. Already you must have built yourself quite a bankroll.’
There would be no sense in trying to bribe Kohler. ‘Tell St-Cyr to join us.’
‘Not until you tell me what makes a man like that one tick.’
‘Jeannot? He discovered that the woman he adored and would have done anything for had betrayed him not once but several times.’
‘And you, Colonel? Did you discover what he’d done and then get him to work for you?’
‘Jeannot and myself are equal partners, fellow members, yes, of the Interaliée, which is where I first met him. This Occupation affords so many opportunities and now, of course, the Argentina he came to love and want to help to build is on the best of terms with the Reich******** and has agreed that, again, he can be accepted as a citizen, especially as he has sufficient capital to buy back and enlarge his ranches.’
‘Travel by submarine?’
‘Perhaps. Now tell St-Cyr to stop whatever he thinks he’s doing and join us.’
‘Me? You still haven’t got it, have you? Louis is the one who usually does all this wrap-up stuff and has a mind of his own.’
Would the cartridges be damp and useless? wondered St-Cyr. Would Jeannot Raymond’s reactions be too swift even then? Would the colonel shoot Hermann?
There was only one way of finding out. He looked at the Lebel in his hand, but to say to it, Don’t fail me again, seemed senseless. Hermann would still have wanted him to try. If not successful, at least he’d know that this partner and friend of his had made the attempt.
All the matches in the packet he’d brought from the car would be needed—merde, they were so hard to get. The black powder from two of the cartridges Hermann had okayed, but should have bitten first and wiggled, was added, as were paper token offerings whose loss the dead would not object to and joss sticks, the shoes and socks left to one side. Bare feet would be best. The rosewood planks in the floor had been lovingly honed and polished so that they glistened.
The four-legged turtle urn he had chosen was large enough to contain the fire and not burn the temple down. The matches flared, the powder took, the paper strips igniting as the joss began at once to burn.
Incense billowed up to be caught by the latest gust and carried to them, but would they be distracted by it, Hermann intuitively realizing what his partner was up to and becoming a part of it?
‘Bob, there’s my soldier,’ sang out Kohler. ‘He’s really missing Élène, Colonel. These what you’re after in my jacket pocket, Bob? The white, lace-trimmed pongee step-ins I used when I found her wedding ring?’
Eagerly Bob tugged at the briefs, pulling Delaroche off-balance. Joss smoke was everywhere …
Smashed in the forehead, the shot reverberating, Jeannot Raymond released his grip on the knife as he fell. ‘COLONEL, DON’T!’ yelled Louis.
Hermann leaped. The pistol was grabbed, wrenched away, Delaroche hit and hit hard with it until he, too, dropped, Bob looking puzzled now, the briefs dangling from his mouth, Suzette Dunand trying to steady herself.
‘Ah, bon,’ said Louis with a sigh. ‘It’s over, Hermann.’
‘Delaroche won’t sing and you know it.’
‘But will be asked to.’
‘Though not by us.’
* * *
Up through the woods, the sounds from the industrial suburb of Suresnes came to mark an end to the day. Wet through and cold, pneumonia was bound to set in. Louis handed him the cognac bottle. ‘It’s safe,’ he said, having downed a goodly measure and found no nicotine. How could he have been so sure?
‘I wasn’t,’ he confessed. ‘I just assumed it since the cork had been bunged home and leaded sixty-seven years ago.’
Below them, prudence had demanded that they leave the Citroën tucked in against the base of an oak that, for some reason, hadn’t been logged, burned or sawn up for lumber in 1871. ‘The Prussians must have felt they needed its shade,’ Louis had mused. Those people had found the fort up there on Mont-Valérien empty. In that distant war, they hadn’t even had to shell that dismal pentagon of buttressed grey stonework at the end of this rutted, boulder-strewn lane. On 29 January of that year they had marched in without a shot having been fired, the strongest of the seventeen such forts in the defence of Paris.
And now? Kohler had to ask and answer, Why now they’re back in it again.
‘Sixty-nine-and-a-half years later,’ said Louis drolly, having calculated it to the Defeat of June 1940. ‘He won’t wait for us, Hermann.’
It was still Sunday 14 February 1943 and they’d been run off their feet. Giselle had remembered Louis’s singing the praises of his friends on place Vendôme and their shop, Enchantment, and had managed to reach it. Taken in by Muriel Barteaux, of Mirage perfume fame, and Chantal Grenier, her partner, both well into their seventies and lifelong companions, she’d been ‘assessed. Complètement nue, my Hermann,’ and now was one of their lingerie mannequins. Good goods, very high class. ‘Another profession,’ she had said and given him a peck on the cheek. ‘Safer, too, I think, than keeping house for one who doesn’t need a housekeeper.’
As if she had ever done that. And Oona? he asked. Oona had found Adrienne Guillaumet, who had been moved to another floor in the Hôtel-Dieu. She’d gone to tell Henri and Louisette that their dear maman would soon be rejoining them and that, for a little, she would need some help.
Oona would stay with her in the flat on the rue Saint-Dominique. A shy and hesitant touch on the arm, that’s all he’d been able to give her, she the same with him. A lingering last look? he wondered.
The boys had got safely away and would work on their respective farms until after the autumn harvest at least. The street would be lonely for Louis but then, he was hardly ever home and not likely to be in the near future.
They continued on up the hill. At least the rain had quit.
‘You forgot something, Hermann. The Ritz.’
And right next door to the shop Enchantment. Adrienne Guillaumet hadn’t been about to sell the use of her self but rather the Biedermeier furniture her husband treasured. They had negotiated the sale to the General Schiller from Baden-Baden. At least it wouldn’t be stolen, and she’d got a fair price, Reichskassenscheine, too, all of fifty thousand of them, a million francs. She would divorce the husband if the courts would let her, would leave him in any case and never wanted to see him again, was thinking of Spain and the Costa del Sol, of a seaside lodging house perhaps, but only because Oona had suggested it. Deauville had been an alternate, though for later, when this Occupation was over.
‘And Marie-Léon Barrault?’ asked Louis.
‘Innocent too.’ It had all been lies and they’d made damned sure the Scapini Commission in Berlin learned of it, since they’d had that sour little priest, Father Marescot of the Notre-Dame de Lorette, write the letter.
When Gaston Morel had told her to take the lift in the Hôtel Grand, and she’d been photographed doing so, she had gone up to the fourth floor, to a room where one of the Bonzen dabbled on the side in the black market and had aspirins, cough syrup and other medicines for sale. Good stuff, too. Things one could trust, Annette having had a bad cold at the time, a temperature, and the only occasion in which her mother had accepted money from Morel. And as for the manager of the Cinéma Impérial trying to get her to have sex with him, one word had been enough, and the muzzle of Louis’s Lebel.
Suzette Dunand they had safely seen on to her train. She might be home by now and would have lots to say when she got there.
‘Which leaves only us, Hermann.’
It didn’t, not quite, but no matter. ‘My boots are leaking again.’
‘You’ll think of something.’
Together they entered the fort within whose cells, it having been built between 1830 and 1848 during the reign of Louis Philippe, languished résistants and others Judge Hercule Rouget had condemned to death but not this late-afternoon’s quota.
The posts were occupied, the blindfolds in place, the volley harsh-sounding on the damp air but brief.
Tall, rheumy-eyed, ramrod stiff in greatcoat and cap, an Iron Cross First Class at the throat, Von Schaumburg had but a few words for them. ‘Your witnessing this won’t look good for either of you, Kohler, but understand that is precisely why I’ve summoned you.’
Maybe 1,500 had been executed so far, maybe more in this most feared of places and buried in its surrounding woods. The Résistance would, of course, be bound to get the wrong message and think this partnership had been present at any number of executions; the Occupier, its SS and Gestapo particularly, would know this wasn’t so, but think the worst of them in any case.
Oberg wasn’t happy and neither was Boemelburg but then, neither were often happy. The Standartenführer Langbehn had been recalled. Sonja Remer hadn’t been able to do what she had most wanted but wouldn’t be leaving the avenue Foch in the near future, so would always be on hand should Oberg take another notion to get rid of them.
Gabrielle was fine, or so it appeared. Safe for the moment, but there’d been no time for her and Louis to spend together.
The bodies were being freed, the blindfolds and ropes to be used again and again, the colonel’s first and then those of the one who had attacked Adrienne Guillaumet so savagely and then had hustled to the passage Jouffroy to rob the stamp shop with the other sous-chef, who now lay beside him.
‘There’s no need for either of you to sign the death notices,’ said Von Schaumburg. ‘My office, and it alone, will take care of that.’
Garnier and Quevillon had also been executed, Berlin pacified. Gradually the streets would return to relative safety. Vivienne Rouget had committed a crime of passion and would never see the inside of a cell or face the breadbasket. Hercule the Smasher was just too valuable to the Occupier, as were those of the Interaliée who had backed the Agence Vidocq. Louis and he would just have to leave it.
‘Until spring comes, Hermann,’ he muttered.
‘Walk with me to my car,’ said Von Schaumburg, ignoring the muted outburst. ‘I’ve something for you.’
Their train would leave at 2000 hours. Vittel was in the Vosges and still in the grip of winter.
‘The Kommandant went to school with me, Kohler. Give him my regards.’
Ach, another Prussian of the old school!
‘And the problem?’ hazarded Louis.
‘Something about a ringer of bells who ought to know, or have known, better. The line wasn’t clear.’
Only when they reached the Citroën did Hermann say, ‘Bellringer, Louis. It has a good ring to it.’
‘Idiot, we’re to get the hell out of Paris and you know it. Wasn’t Talbotte a member of that inner circle?’
A last look uphill was just that, the Kommandant von Gross-Paris’s car heading straight for them as they stepped aside.
‘I’ll drive, Louis. It’s better for you if I’m seen to.’
They got in, were crowded, greeted and licked as if they’d been absent for an eternity. ‘Pour l’amour de Dieu, Hermann, get that animal away from me!’
‘He’s lonely. You’ll get use to him. He’s good for the image.’
‘Ours is tarnished enough!’
Bob was persistent; Bob needed his friends. Finally Louis settled back in defeat to place a hand on Bob’s head, which had somehow found its way into his lap.
‘Do you think the backseat would be better for the two of you?’ offered Kohler. There was no answer. ‘Bellringer, Louis. It must have something to do with a monk or priest, or novice or one or the other. Bob’s going to love it. He’ll feel right at home. It’ll be good for him.’
Hermann always had to have the last word. In a way, the Occupier in him demanded it but some philosophical thing at least should be said just to put him off stride and make him think.
A sigh would be best, and then, ‘There are no endings, Hermann, only beginnings.’