The Girl in the Baker's Van

by Richard Savin

  ‘No, I haven’t. It is from Madame Varailles; she let me use some of hers. Very gallant of you to notice.’

  ‘It’s just that you weren’t wearing any when we met at the house in Lyon – and not in the car.’

  ‘It’s not something you think to take with you when you are a fugitive – on the run at a moment’s notice.’ She smiled at him and wrinkled her nose, and he knew she was teasing him.

  In the evening over dinner Monsieur Varailles told them he had arranged to pass them on to a group in Montpellier who would get them to Narbonne, where a guide would take them across the mountains into Spain. Earlier Grainger had tried to persuade Varailles not to have Kasha killed, but the man was adamant that it had to be done; there was a code of retribution and the Maquis would not step aside. He made one concession – that they would not execute him before Grainger had been given the chance to meet with him to retrieve whatever secret he was carrying to the Americans.

  *

  It was three in the morning when Evangeline heard a tapping on the door of her room. She got out of bed, slipped on her coat and opened the door. Grainger was standing there and for a moment it passed through her head that he was going to try to proposition her. Then she saw he was fully dressed. ‘Get your clothes on and bring your things – everything – and hurry. We have to leave.’

  She looked jittery. ‘Turn your back while I dress. What’s happening?’

  ‘A raid.’

  Minutes later she was in her clothes and ready to leave.

  ‘Here let me take this.’ He picked up her knapsack and with that in one hand he took her arm with the other and almost bundled her downstairs. They went out through the kitchen and into the garage. Mathieu had already opened the garage doors and had the Citroen’s engine running. His father opened the main gate, then got into the car with them. As they sped through the streets with Grainger and Evangeline in the back she still wasn’t sure what was going on.

  ‘My father received a call about half an hour ago. There’s going to be a raid on the house.’

  ‘Who?’ she said, glancing first at Grainger then at Mathieu. She had regained her composure after the rushed departure and now had an air of calm.

  ‘Gestapo, we think – the tip-off wasn’t certain. It’s not the gendarmerie – that much we do know.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  Grainger shrugged. ‘No idea. Monsieur Varailles is taking us to a rendezvous with his contact, but I don’t know where.’

  CHAPTER 18

  Groucho Marx and the Pythias

  ‘You have something else for me?’

  ‘I do.’ The voice of Peter Becker sounded confident and there was a slight hint of triumph in it. ‘The woman – the one who saw Kandler go under the train – she has identified the man who pushed him – it was Kraus.’

  ‘Kraus!’

  ‘Yes, Kriminalinspector. Kraus. I have also found something else. I looked through the files Kandler had closed. They had a common thread; they were all wealthy, they all had money. I have interrogated some of them; they all say the same thing: they paid Herr Kandler to close their files.’

  ‘Blackmail?’

  ‘I don’t think so. They all made single payments; there were no further demands. Also I have looked into the bank account of Kraus. It has been difficult – the SD resent your investigation.’

  ‘Naturally, there is no love for the Gestapo in the SD even in good times; they won’t be happy with us investigating one of their own. What did you find?’

  ‘Every time Kandler received a payment Kraus paid money into his own bank account, usually a day or so later, though not in every case. I believe he may have kept back some cash on one or two occasions, but the pattern is there.’

  ‘Becker, you are doing an excellent job – you would make a good detective. Maybe you should apply for a transfer out of Records and into the Kriminalbureau.’

  ‘Thank you, Kriminalinspector.’

  Schreiber went to the bar, sat down at a table and ordered a glass of beer. He took out his notebook and neatly wrote down the new evidence that Becker had provided; then, on a paper serviette, he sketched out an organisational chart. First he drew four boxes and put a name into each: Helmut Kandler, Ludwig Kraus, the Pole, and the Apartment. Next he linked the boxes with long meandering lines: Kraus was joined to Kandler by the payments and also by pushing Kandler under the train. Why would he do that? After all, Kandler was the goose laying the golden eggs; unless – perhaps – there was some kind of falling out between them? He drew another line from Kandler to the Pole and then looped it back to Kraus. The Abwehr had confirmed that Kraus was working with Kasha and the SD had corroborated it. The Pole must have been at Potsdamer Platz on the same quai as Kraus, and Kraus had been identified by the woman. They were all linked, so they must all have been party to the extortion racket Becker had uncovered. He drew another line from the Pole, this time to the apartment in Kreuzberg. Kasha had been there; the concierge had identified him – but what had he taken from the apartment? Was it the package they had intercepted at the farmhouse? He ran another line back to Kandler’s box. Kandler had provided the key from the file in vault 37 East, so again they were connected.

  He drew another box on the serviette and carefully named it Farmhouse. He surrounded the box with four satellite circles, giving each one a name: Evangeline Pfeiffer, Alain Pfeiffer, Kraus, and the Pole. Once more he drew lines joining together those parties whom he knew were connected. He sat and contemplated his chart.

  He went back to his notebook and, starting on a fresh page, wrote down in his meticulous hand the new conclusions he now drew from the chart. Kraus and Kandler were both involved in a racket to extort money in exchange for closing the files on Gestapo suspects. Kandler and Kraus were sharing the proceeds of their criminal enterprise. Kandler must have given the Pole a key to the apartment at Kreuzberg; there was no other way he could have got it – was that connected? Kandler had been murdered but it was Kraus not the Pole who had done it. Why – had they fallen out?

  He started a fresh line in his notebook. Was Kandler swindling Kraus? Schreiber stopped abruptly and snapped his fingers in the air – ‘Of course, the paper,’ he half said the words out loud and a waiter nearby came running over, thinking that Schreiber was snapping his fingers to attract his attention. Schreiber dismissed him with a wave of his hand and went back to his theory. The cut-up paper with the 100 franc note wrapped around it; the Pole was paying Kandler for the key but had short-changed him and given him an envelope full of newspaper – what the Americans called a Chicago Bank Roll. So it was the other way round: Kraus and the Pole were swindling Kandler. The girl could have been in it with the Pole; when she was arrested she had 4,900 Swiss francs and Becker had discovered that Kandler was expecting 5,000 to pay the clinic in Bern for his mother’s treatment. But when he had questioned Alain Pfeiffer the young man had insisted that neither he nor his sister had ever met the Pole before; yet she was seen with him in Dijon just before he was arrested – they must be connected. Had the brother deceived him?

  Schreiber ordered another beer and leaned back in his chair, trying to clear his mind. A few minutes later he returned to the chart, this time looking at the Farmhouse diagram. ‘We shall suppose,’ he said under his breath, ‘that the Pole has taken a package from the apartment in Kreuzberg – but what was in it?’ He had seen it briefly at the farmhouse where they had lain in wait and trapped Pfeiffer and his sister. It was a small package wrapped in oilcloth and tied with a wax sealed cord. He knew the Pole had handed it on to a courier known as Cigale; Pfeiffer had told him as much. He had arrested Pfeiffer, leaving Kraus with the package and that was the last time anyone saw Kraus. The Pole and the girl then disappear, turning up later in Dijon where the Pole was arrested and on him they found Kraus’s official SD issue automatic pistol. What did that mean? He presumed it meant that Kraus was dead, but why? Had they fallen out – and over what? A picture of what had happened was emergi
ng, but the why of it all still remained obscure.

  He drained the beer glass he was holding and looked at his watch. It was midday, time for lunch. He got up and made his way to the restaurant feeling content with his morning’s work. He was making progress and that satisfied him. For the moment he could think of other things and his mind shifted to thoughts of Gudrun; after he had eaten he would get a line through to Berlin and talk to her. He had been away for more than two weeks and he was missing her. This French food was too rich, too fussy; he missed her good home cooking. He was finishing his lunch when he received a call from Commissaire Duval. ‘We have found the girl – and possibly your British agent.’

  At two o’clock he checked out of the hotel and took a taxi to Perrache station. At two-twenty he was seated in a first class compartment on the Lyon–Marseille express, first stop Avignon. The call to Gudrun would have to wait. Now he needed to reinforce his position; he would need assistance to throw a net around his quarry. No point in settling for just these two fish, he told himself; if he let them swim a little while longer they would lead him to the entire shoal and then he could swallow the lot – in one bite.

  *

  They had been on the road for more than two hours when the Citroen pulled off the main route and headed along an unmade track. It was rough and showed signs of being little used; the sound of flying gravel whooshed and rattled, drumming on the underside of the wheel arches, thrown up by the tyres as the car bucked and bumped its way through a dark wooded landscape. In the loom of the headlights the tree branches and bushes rushed out at them like black spidery fingers lashing at the passing car, thrashing against its sides. After a short while the woods gave way to scrub and smaller wind-beaten trees; the ground beneath them became sandy and the car slewed and skittered, pitched sideways by exposed tree roots and clumps of knotted grass, forcing Grainger and Evangeline to hold tightly onto the grab rails on the seat backs.

  Eventually the pace began to slow and, as it did so, the headlights picked out the shoreline of a large body of water. Monsieur Varailles slewed the car to a halt, throwing up a shower of earth as the tyres dug into the loose ground. Varailles switched off the lights and killed the engine. They sat in silence and waited. They had barely stopped before a figure appeared from behind a low sand dune. As it approached Grainger could just make out from the silhouette that it was a man – and he was armed.

  ‘Where is this place?’ he asked Mathieu, who had screwed himself round in his seat and whispered to Grainger to be quiet.

  ‘It’s the Étang de Thau. There,’ he said, pointing to a faint patch of lights shimmering on the shoreline, ‘that’s Bouzigues. It’s a fishing village – good for rock oysters.’

  Monsieur Varailles got out of the car and greeted the man, embracing and kissing him on both cheeks. He signalled to the others to get out and join him. ‘This is Emile,’ he said in a hushed voice. ‘He will take you from here. You will have to walk to the village – the car would attract unwanted attention. There is a fishing boat waiting to take you to the end of the Étang where there is a wine barge that will take you through the canals all the way to the city of Narbonne. It will take a few days but it will be safe. No one will see you so long as you stay inside.’

  Mathieu put out his hand to Grainger. ‘We shall leave you now. We have to dispose of the car. We’ll dump it somewhere remote and get the train back to Avignon.’ Grainger shook his hand warmly and after he had thanked Monsieur Varailles and Mathieu had hugged Evangeline they followed Emile, their guide, along the soft sandy shoreline. The sky was clear and a newly risen moon lit up the water with a silvery shimmering radiance. Twenty minutes later they reached the first of a line of small, brightly painted open fishing craft pulled up onto the shore, their keels dug into the sand to keep them upright. Beyond the last of the small boats Grainger could just make out a stone jetty. ‘Nous sommes arrivés,’ Emile announced.

  Moored alongside the jetty was another fishing boat, slightly larger than those drawn up on the sand; it was ten metres long with a day cabin for shelter. There was a crude iron gantry mounted on the stern carrying the winch gear over which was draped a hawser dangling into a billowing mound of nets dumped down in the bilge. Everything had a strong smell of fish and seaweed about it. A short man in a greasy, salt-caked woollen sweater greeted them, announcing he was Louis, the skipper. He had very few teeth and a face so deeply lined by his years in harsh weather that he looked like a wood carving; it was a face that would not have looked out of place as a figurehead on some ancient galleon or a gargoyle on a cathedral gutter. Emile bid them goodbye and they climbed down in among the ribs of the vessel, feeling it roll as they did so. Louis the skipper gave a hand to steady Evangeline and pointed them to the cabin forward.

  Satisfied they were safely stowed, he took a short cranked handle, slotted it onto the dog of the open flywheel and cranked a clattery little petrol engine into life. Unhitching a short rope that had been looped over a cast iron bollard embedded in the stone jetty, he shoved off and set the boat free. There was a slight thump has he pushed the gear lever and it engaged with the spinning flywheel. Over the stern a stubby bronze propeller churned the black water, lighting it up with silver-flecked foam; the bow lifted a little to ride on a small compressed wave as it divided the waters ahead and chugged its way into the night.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ the skipper shouted to them as they crouched on the benches inside the cramped cabin, ‘it’s calm tonight. This water can get very angry if the wind is up and coming onshore.’

  Looking away to their left they could just make out the narrow strip of land that hemmed in the shallow body of water they were now on, separating it from the open sea. The water in this lagoon would not be easy in a strong wind; it could pile up a short head sea that could overwhelm a small vessel with an unwary skipper.

  It took two hours to run the length of the Étang and the night was already well settled in when they finally arrived at their rendezvous with the barge. It sat at its mooring, inert and solid, a Leviathan in crumbling black paintwork with rusting steel gouges – a legacy of many encounters with the stone ramparts of the innumerable locks punctuating the progress of the canal. In the darkness it had the foreboding outline of a lifeless and haunted hulk; its giant slab sides dwarfed the fishing boat as it came alongside and gently bumped against the wooden staithe where the leviathan was tied off. Inside the steel beast a dog started to bark; then there was the clunk of a door being thrown open and hitting the side of the wheelhouse.

  The old skipper of the fishing boat hauled himself up onto the dock with surprising agility for one of his age. Having secured a line, he put out a hand for Evangeline to grasp then pulled her ashore, leaving Grainger to follow under his own devices. Once on the tow path they picked their way along the side of the hull to where a short, steep passerelle had been laid from the deck to the land. There the bargee waited, a paraffin lamp held out to guide them, splashing a puddle of pale yellow light onto the foot of the rising wooden ramp. He greeted Evangeline with a polite little nod, at the same time doffing his leather cap then offering a hand to steady her as she made her way aboard. Grainger followed up behind with her knapsack in one hand and his grip in the other. Inside, the wheelhouse was a chaos of rope ends, buckets, bowls and tools. On one wall a bicycle hung like a dead hunting trophy, its frame supported on hooks. The long handle of a deck swab rested on the saddle while the mop head rested on the handlebars. In among the clutter Grainger’s eye noted a shotgun propped against the bulkhead close to the controls. From the wheelhouse a steep companionway led down into a surprisingly generous saloon, dimly lit by two more oil lamps. Halfway along the length of the saloon a pot-bellied wood-burning stove glowed invitingly, the crackling flames throwing dancing shadows across the opposing bulkhead. The furnishing was rudimentary with just two bunks, one above the other, on one side and a galley of sorts at the far end. Along the other side a table and four chairs were squared up against the wall.


  They waited in silence while the bargee and the skipper talked in low tones. The latter then took his leave and after a few minutes they heard the engine on the fishing boat sputter into life and drone away into the obscurity of the night. Shortly after that the bargee descended the steps, took off his cap and introduced himself – a formality that was accomplished with some difficulty for Grainger because the bargee appeared to be speaking in a language other than French.

  ‘I think he says his name is Berenguer but I can’t be sure,’ Evangeline said uncertainly.

  He was a short stocky man with dark glossy hair that was surprisingly neat. He was dressed in blue overalls and had a leather cap of the sort engineers and train drivers wore. His moustache was thick and drooped across his upper lip, and it could have made him look quite lugubrious were it not for a pair of twinkling dark eyes framed by thin-rimmed glasses and a cheerful grin – a bit like a slightly shabby Groucho Marx, Grainger thought.

  ‘I think I’ll just call him Groucho,’ he said, half under his breath.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ the newly christened Groucho asked, trying to find the words in French, sensing they were having difficulty understanding. ‘I shall bring you something to eat,’ he announced, without waiting for a response. Again the accent with which he spoke the words was thick and guttural and, as before, Grainger could not understand what had been said and he looked askance at Evangeline.

  The bargee went to a bulkhead door which let onto the engine room; he opened it and the dog they had heard barking when they arrived stuck its head out. It eyed them suspiciously for a moment then, deciding they were there by invitation of its master, stepped out into the saloon and sniffed at them. It was not a dog of any great distinction or pedigree but it did its job; it was there to guard the boat and raise the alarm if intruders came near, and this it did perfectly well. Grainger looked at the hound distrustfully, not convinced that its initial friendly response would be sustained. However, when Evangeline put out a hand and the dog, after a nervous investigation, licked it and its stunted tail started to wag vigorously, he changed his mind and joined in with a friendly pat on its haunches.