‘Then do you have a Leutnant Thiessen?’
Had that been where he had come by the thought of a flat to let? ‘C’est occupé but that one comes and goes. Days, weeks even, we do not see him.’
‘And today?’
It would be best to shrug. ‘Alas, away again. Marseille, I think, or was it Toulon? Ah’—a hand was raised to stop himself—‘it was Caen. Of this I am sure for he has said, you understand, that he would try to bring me a little Calvados. He’s always bringing me things. A jar of honey from Saint-Saturnin in the Vaucluse. It was magnificent. Some Pont-l’Évêque from the pays d’Auge in Normandy. Superb! Once the fois gras aux truffes from Périgueux. None is better. Shrimp, too, from Honfleur.’
A well-travelled man. ‘And he’s away again?’
Had it needed to be asked? ‘Today at noon, the train to Caen, as I have just said.’
And the Forbidden Zone and the Retaliatory One sites, was that it? ‘Might I see his flat?’
It was serious. ‘Ah, monsieur, that, it would not be possible, of course, and certainly not for such as myself to sanction.’
They had understood each other perfectly, thought Dirksen, as 500 francs in small bills found their way from wallet to pocket: the smaller the bill, the more appreciated, since fewer would take notice when used.
‘And another,’ said this one in the fine grey business suit who spoke French almost as well as the Leutnant Thiessen, thought Hermé Lemoine. To have not understood or expected a little gift would have been but to arouse this one’s suspicions further, hence that little extra, but was he of the SS? This he thought most likely, so there would now be further questions.
The flat was on the fourth floor, Lemoine gasping for breath and saying, ‘Monsieur, please be sure to touch nothing. Take as long as you wish, of course, but put the lock back on when you leave.’
Herr Thiessen would not be so foolish as to have left anything incriminating, thought Lemoine, but it wasn’t good, this one’s having come here.
‘The former tenant,’ said Dirksen, ‘was a Mademoiselle Bellecour, I believe.’
Ah, merde alors. ‘Her … her things, they are in storage.’
‘Where?’
May God have mercy on him. ‘In the attic. Herr Thiessen, he has insisted that it would only be correct to treat her possessions with respect since she didn’t return after the exodus. But for all we know, she could well be dead.’ Quickly he crossed himself.
‘And her son?’
‘Her son? Ah! the boy. Now … now what was his name … ?’
‘Martin.’
‘Yes, yes, that was it. Mischief. Always running in the corridors and yelling. Certainly children, they must be tolerated, but that one … He flew model airplanes down the stairwells and from the windows, greatly disturbing the other tenants. Me, I had to smash several.’
And now are looking decidedly uncomfortable, thought Dirksen, since you’ve suddenly realized that she could well have been involved in something and is far from being dead. ‘Where did she work?’
Sacré nom de nom, this one was not going to leave it. ‘At a shop on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Le Magasin d’antiquités de Monsieur Georges Avisse et fils. It’s … it’s near the place Vendôme, an excellent location, you understand, but the sons, they are no more. Both were killed in the Great War, the one in the summer of 1915, the other just two days before the Armistice.’
‘How is it that you remember it so well?’
Could he not have seen this coming? wondered Lemoine. ‘The Mademoiselle Bellecour often spoke of it in the past. Before the Defeat, Monsieur Avisse, he was very fond of her. She was like a daughter to him and he most certainly needed someone to fill such a vacuum, he having also lost the mother of those boys.’
‘And is he still alive?’
That, too, should have been foreseen. ‘Oui, mais certainement.’
‘Bon.’
* A suburb just to the north of Paris, and location of the largest of the many flea markets
*The salad shaker, the paddy wagon
*A little mousetrap
*The Sicherheitsdienst, the security service of the SS and Nazi Party
*The intelligence service of the OKW, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the High Command
*Early in February 1944, the SD took over the Abwehr and put an end to this historic and internationally renowned intelligence service.
*Great shudder
* The STO, the forced labour draft
* Three storeys in North America
* The Todt Organization were building the Atlantic Wall
4
In the late afternoon, those galleries in the Louvre that had had things put back in place by the Occupier after the Defeat were crowded with servicemen and other such “tourists”, but here among the Grecian pottery and Etruscan antiquities there was relative calm. Here there were fewer common soldiers, more officers with their Parisiennes, the demeanour subdued, the comparative hush seeming to clash with the din.
Angélique knew Martin and she were still being followed. Even after more than two hours of going from gallery to gallery, they hadn’t been able to lose them. Two Frenchmen, the one older, the other younger as before, but was there not also a third man or woman? It was uncanny, but she couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched by someone so good at it, they would never discover who it was until too late. But here, even someone like that would tend to stand out, as if transfixed in glass of their own, and she was glad to have held off until now when the crowds had begun to thin.
‘I once had a very real passion for these pieces, Martin,’ she confessed.
Though she was trying to hide it, he knew she was distressed by the thought of a third follower. The tone of voice would easily give things like that away, but she continued anyway.
‘By their very simplicity, chéri, such common household items radiate a gentle, uncontrived beauty. Amphorae like these were used to store wine, honey, grain or oil. Every day the people of those ancient times would go to vessels like these before preparing a meal.’
Hydriae were for storing water and for carrying it from the wells, and she told him the handles had different uses, the one for holding it securely when on the shoulder, the other two for lifting it. The terra-cotta would keep the water cool.
There had been no sign of Dirksen or Kraus, thought Angélique. Certainly there were SS, but that third follower was different anyway. Faceless, soulless, he or she wouldn’t care that she was learning fast how to spot such people.
Always the one would walk on ahead, the other dropping back. There’d be a pause to light a cigarette that was then quickly tossed away. Did they not know that cigarettes were far too valuable, that almost everyone carried a tin for the collected butts, even from the pavement? Tobacco was so scarce, it was the most desirable of currencies. No one threw their butts away except the Occupier and his French friends, les gestapistes français, the gangsters and such who’d been let out of jail in the autumn of 1940 and put to work. Others too, of course. Lots of those. Too many.
And oh for sure, they would use the shaded shop windows as mirrors to watch Martin and herself. Instantly they would change direction if Martin and she were to head towards them. La Samaritaine, that largest of the big department stores, had been perfect. Though filled with Boches, like here, there had been lots of chances to pause and pretend to be interested in something, even with the shortages, but there, too, she had the feeling of a third watcher. And if they couldn’t shake him or her in broad daylight like now, they’d never do it in the blackout, even after the curfew.
‘We play a game, Martin, but every time we make a move, this one has anticipated us, when many times before, the other two haven’t.’
Martin knew she wouldn’t trust him to search on his own. Everyone else here was taller. He could dart among them and
not be seen. Tugging at her hand to remind her of this, she only shook her head and said again, ‘It’s too risky. Ah, chéri, I know you’re good at spotting things, and yes, your running away last night has brought us a new friend, but …’
She couldn’t bring herself to say she was afraid the Résistance were going to demand that she work for them. Coward, he said silently. My father is with those people. He’s their leader, Angélique. That’s why he didn’t go to England!
‘Dirksen or Kraus will find my things, Martin. They’ll force Monsieur Lemoine to identify me. Oh for sure, he’ll deny it at first. He’s a good man, but even those can be persuaded in times like this. Then they’ll march me to the shop where I used to work and Monsieur Georges, that dear man who would have had tears at the sight of me, will have far more with me in handcuffs.’
But is he even alive? she wondered, suddenly realizing that she didn’t even know if the shop was still there. ‘I’m a stranger to the city I loved. I’ve been made to feel an alien who has really done nothing to harm anyone.’
The wine jugs in their glass cases were called oinochoeae, and all of them had been decorated. Some of the figures were in black, others in black and brown …
‘Martin … Martin, come and see these. They’re my favourites,’ she called out. ‘These white lecythi from Attica are more than twenty-four hundred years old.’
She wasn’t even looking at them. She was peering through the glass at the entrance to the gallery and beyond it to the stairwell.
‘I first met your father here,’ she said, and he knew, from the tone of her voice, that it was a very special place, but couldn’t be angry with her for having stolen his father away from his mother.
From case to case they went, she searching for a better view of the entrance to that staircase. ‘For hours afterwards,’ she continued, ‘your father and I talked about these, he sketching them from memory in the café we had gone to. The Tanagra figures, Martin, the white lecythi that were used for holding perfume. Me, I kept the sketches but wish I hadn’t.’
She was moving swiftly now, and he had to hurry, but when they reached the stairwell, the person she was after had disappeared.
The others, the two French ones, caught up with them, only to stumble back in confusion as she yelled, ‘JUST GO AWAY, EH? QUIT FOLLOWING ME!’ and threw herself at them.
One collided with a lieutenant who had come to help. There was a scuffle and Martin heard it behind them as they ran, Angélique saying, ‘Stay close. Don’t let them find us.’
Down and down the stairs they went, knocking into people, being knocked aside until, darting through the turnstiles, they raced for a street, ran up it to turn a corner, then another and another, she finally trying to catch her breath while saying, ‘Leave me to watch. Hurry! Wait round the next corner.’
They had lost them. Martin felt certain of it, but when Angélique rejoined him, still catching her breath, she wasn’t grinning and didn’t shake a fist towards that palace of things, just took him by the hand and held it to her chest to let him feel the racing of her heart. ‘I saw the third one, Martin. I’m certain of it. He was wearing the uniform of a Wehrmacht lieutenant, as before, and he …’
She turned away to press her forehead against the stones of a building and stamp a foot. ‘It can’t be,’ she swore. ‘It can’t, Martin.’
People were beginning to take notice and Martin was worried those two Frenchmen would catch up. Tugging at her dress, he wanted to cry out to her, Was it my father?
‘His ears stuck out just like yours,’ she said and wept. ‘He only glanced at me. He knows who I am, Martin. He was looking at you, not at me when I first caught sight of him.’
But if it was, the Germans would shoot him, and in her mind’s eye, she saw Anthony with his shirt collar open, no tie, gaunt and unshaven, the hands tied behind his back, the whitewashed post and wall spattered with the blood and brains of others.
‘Mon petit, je t’aime,’ she said, ‘but it can’t have been him. For three years now I’ve believed entirely that he was in England, for that is what we had agreed when he left us on that road.’
With the Messerschmitts coming over again. But now you’re no longer so positive, are you? said Martin. Didn’t I tell you time and again that he was still here in France, but you, you would never listen.
In the heat of the attic, flies buzzed against the grimy, cobwebbed windows. Lost in thought, Dirksen heard them as he had at the avenue Foch when discovering that little parachute. Angélique Bellecour had lied, and the string of her lies had included a son who could not possibly have lived in the flat below. There was absolutely nothing of the boy either down there or up here among the contents of the suitcases and wardrobe trunks he had opened. Not one pair of short pants or even a broken toy or balsawood glider. The concierge had also lied and would have to be thoroughly questioned. Vergès was still free. Marie-Hélène would see to him later, but after their arrests, the mayor of Abbeville and the doctor could perhaps be placed in the same cell or made to confront each other in one of the interrogation rooms. But what of the Leutnant Ernst Wilhelm Thiessen who had occupied the woman’s flat since the Defeat of 1940? Was he the one who had been photographed watching her and Vergès in the Jardin du Luxembourg earlier? This could still not be stated with any surety.
The only photograph in the flat had been cracked and frayed at its edges, and clearly it had been carried into battle a good many times. It was of the wife and two children in the Reich. Thiessen’s son had looked to be about twelve years old and very like the mother; the girl perhaps four years younger and not at all like her, but had she been like Thiessen?
To not have had any other photos wasn’t just curious, since one would normally have had several. This one, too, had been found leaning unframed on the mantelpiece against the left of a pair of exquisite blue-and-white porcelain ginger jars, and it had appeared so out of place, he still had to wonder if it had been deliberately left there to throw them off.
Thiessen, if indeed that was his real name, hadn’t just lived quietly when in Paris. He hadn’t disturbed one stick of the Bellecour woman’s furnishings. He had also, apparently, packed away her personal things with the utmost care. The lingerie had been folded perfectly, the blouses and sweaters too. Each skirt, suit, dress or pair of slacks had been carefully hung in one of the wardrobe trunks, her shoes cleaned and polished—had Thiessen revered her memory? If so, that could only mean they had known each other from before the war.
Such a conclusion could, perhaps, fit with an Abwehr identity, but being one of the special agents now didn’t fit with the repeated experience of heavy fighting the photograph indicated. Perhaps he had been transferred to the Abwehr after the Blitzkrieg in the west, but if so, where then did that leave his knowing the woman before the Defeat? Something wasn’t right.
In one corner of the salon downstairs there was a blue-and-white jardinière with a “kentia” palm. The restaurant La Vagengende had had just such palms and the Bellecour woman had noticed them—he was certain of this.
Beside that jardinière there had been a seventeenth-century bergère with tabouret, both in a plush red velvet. The first had faced into the salon, but from it, Thiessen could not possibly have seen the photograph, yet he seemed to have preferred that chair to all others or the sofa and the settee.
Two lovely sketches by Pierre-Joseph Redouté had hung on the nearby wall. Campion in one, camellias and narcissi in the other.
Here was a woman, then, who claimed to be a secretary and to have a son, but who had lived without the boy and had had a love of old things and passion for collecting. One of comparatively modest means, in the right place at the right time perhaps, hence her having worked for an antiques dealer on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Had she travelled as a buyer for Monsieur Georges Avisse? Probably, but why had Thiessen changed nothing? Even the ashtray he had used while sitting in t
hat chair had been taken into the kitchen to be left on the drainboard, spotless and ready for use on return.
At La Vagengende she had let it slip that her son’s father had been a designer of yachts. One room in the flat had been given over to an office, and it was there that he had felt the lieutenant might perhaps have left a little something out of place. The drafting table before the windows had been cleaned, the room too, but there had been all the paraphernalia of design—pencils, callipers, protractors and compasses. No sketches, no designs. Just everything else, including mechanical pencils, one of which Thiessen had obviously been examining only to have been called away by something.
It had lain in the centre of the drafting table and when he had picked it up, Dirksen recalled that the barrel hadn’t been tightly closed.
Opening it, a single length of extra pencil lead had slid out. There had also been a packet of cigarette papers in the pocket of one of the lieutenant’s jackets that had hung in one of the two armoires in the bedroom, the other having been emptied, its contents now up here. But had the woman and her “son” brought a message from Abbeville that had been written on cigarette paper and inserted into that pencil he had recovered for her Martin? Had Thiessen suggested the means?
Only Vergès or the mayor of Abbeville could give the answer. Thiessen’s clothes had all borne prewar labels from shops in Cologne and Berlin. Sauer’s, a sportswear shop on the Höhestrasse, also Karstadt’s in Neukölln and Tietz und Wertheim in the Leipziggerstrasse. His comb-and-brush set had come from a shop in the Hauptverkehrsader Kölns.
If Thiessen was of the enemy, he had gone to great lengths to flesh out his background, even to providing himself with a wife and two children and to burning all of his designs for yachts. Had he killed or found the body of the real Thiessen during the Blitzkrieg and adopted that identity?
Turning back to the wardrobe trunks, Dirksen found her jewellery box and took it over to the window. Many of the pieces were very old, some even from the sixteenth century, he felt. Beautiful things picked up at estate sales in distress. Gold and emeralds, cameos and carnelians, exquisitely wrought earrings of wire gold in tiny baskets that were strung with seed pearls. A rosary of carved garnets, a necklace of topaz. Some diamonds. Rings, pendants, brooches and strands of pearls. Amethysts, aquamarines, jet and amber; a small fortune, undeclared and unregistered.
The Little Parachute Page 10