That’s one of them, he said to himself, but didn’t know if it was Kempf or le Blanc who had watched the corridor. Louis would have found Marie-Claire de Brisson by now. Had they slit her throat, had they strung her up and cut off her breasts?
There wasn’t a sound, only the heavy, close smell of wool and silk, linen, satin and cotton, of things from the thirties, things of quality.
Louis, he wondered. Louis … but stayed where he was.
Still in the office, St-Cyr could see that all around the shrouded lamp on the floor beneath Mademoiselle de Brisson were the scattered clumps of her dark red hair that had been hacked off. Hairs clung to her pale shoulders, they were webbed in the blood that drained steadily from wrists that were tied together so that she hung suspended from the ceiling lamp by a length, not of rope, but of silk, while her ankles were tied to the front legs of the desk by equal lengths of lingerie. Hairs were caught in the small of her back and over the mounds of her buttocks. They clung to her breasts that, like lumps of butchered meat, lay on the desk behind her.
They had cut her throat and had slashed her wrists.
He crossed himself and silently begged her forgiveness for not having arrived sooner. He knew that, though she might well have told Kempf and le Blanc where the money was, they wouldn’t leave until they had killed Hermann and him.
He knew that, though his eyes would have adjusted to the lamplight from the floor, still he would have to open the door to face the darkness of the storeroom and the bullets. Joanne demanded that he put an end to the Sonderführer and his friend. The other victims demanded it too, and so did this one.
Searching the door, he realized that as soon as he approached it, he would break the constancy of the faint light escaping from beneath and that this would signal them to fire.
There were samples of clothing, a small stack of scarves. Marie-Claire de Brisson’s dress and underthings lay on the floor.
He picked them up and tossed them so that they fell through the light, breaking it …
Kempf fired. Le Blanc fired. The door splintered. Bullets hit Maire-Claire de Brisson’s back and seat, bullets tore into her.
Crouched, he waited. He asked, Where’s Hermann? Hermann …
Kohler let the two of them cautiously approach the door and when, at last, they stood hesitantly near it, fired twice and only twice.
Kempf fell. Le Blanc swung round to fire and he shot him in the face at point-blank range.
Then he just stood there clinging to a clothes rack trying to find his voice and saying at last, ‘Louis … Louis, it’s over.’
But, of course, it wasn’t over. Ah, no, not quite.
In the crowded salesroom on the ground floor of the Jeu de Paume, Denise St. Onge found it difficult to watch for Franz and Michel’s return. She thought perhaps they would be at the very back but when she turned to look, as she often had, two generals and their lady friends smiled and blocked her view and this made her furious though she always managed a brief smile in return.
The Cranach was being offered. Goering much favoured works by this early sixteenth-century German painter; so, too, did Hitler. The bidding had reached 175,000 of the new francs but neither Andreas Hofer, Goering’s buyer, nor Haberstock, the Berlin art dealer who bought for the Führer’s private collection, had bid against each other. Interest seemed to be waning. The gavel was being raised …
She panicked at the thought of such a low price and tried to find Franz and Michel by looking both ways along the rows of chairs, all of which were occupied by very special people, by dealers and their clients and friends. Others too.
The crowd was equally thick and close and standing twenty or so deep in a semicircle around the sixty or so chairs. Goering was three rows in front of her and a little to her left—at the very front—and she wished she could have sat closer to him, wished that he didn’t seem to have forgotten all about her.
There was no sign of Franz and Michel. No sign at all. She couldn’t stand up to look for them, couldn’t raise a hand or try otherwise to signal to one of the security people for help. What was she to do if … if Franz and Michel didn’t succeed in taking care of Marie-Claire? Just suppose both had been arrested or … or had been killed?
She shuddered at the thought, clutched and unclutched the gloves in the lap of her black silk dress until, on hearing the auctioneer say, ‘I have 175,000, mesdames et messieurs. Have I one eighty?’ she finally forced her hands to stop.
Goering’s slab-hard cheeks were flushed, the blue eyes fiercely intent—Bâtard, she shrieked inwardly. You promised Franz to bid it up so that we could get a good price and you … you would take the pieces back home with you.
Suddenly it was cold and lonely for her. The Reichsmarschall puffed benignly on his cigar and stared up at the painting of three naked girls standing before a knight in armour—armour for God’s sake! Wasn’t it too heavy for a knight to sit like that on the ground? Didn’t knights have to be hoisted on and off their horses?
There was a high cliff in the near background with a turreted castle on its summit, a lake or river far below, with bits of fir forest along the shores and mountains with other castles in the far distance. The whole thing was very brooding, very Germanic.
No art critic, Kohler snorted inwardly at the skinny, tight-assed virgins in the painting and thought the walrus with the cigar an idiot for looking so greedily up at them. ‘He’s got the hots for that bit of canvas, Louis.’
The hots …
‘175,000, mesdames et messieurs. Do I hear one eighty?’
Her heart sank and Denise St. Onge knew Franz and she had been betrayed, that Goering, distant relative or no relative, agreement or no agreement, intended to do just as he pleased.
Hanging tapestries, behind and to the sides of the auctioneer, screened a passageway for the assistants as they brought the pieces up for display or took away those that had been sold. This cover extended right to the sides of the hall and she knew that there were doorways there and that Franz and Michel could well have spotted her from behind the tapestries, yet she hadn’t caught a glimpse of either.
St-Cyr saw her nervously wipe beneath each eye with a knuckle. Pale … she was so pale. He heard the auctioneer saying, ‘I have 175,000, mesdames et messieurs. Do I hear one eighty?’
The gavel would come down. Denise St. Onge couldn’t lift her eyes from her lap, only shuddered as it came down, down and then …
One eighty, signalled Andreas Hofer who was sitting to the left of the Reichsmarschall and could just be seen by nudging the edge of the tapestry aside.
‘I have one eighty. Do I hear one eighty-five?’
She no longer seemed to care, was desperately afraid and shrinking into herself—so much so, St-Cyr wondered if she had seen them.
‘Goering buys, Hermann, and Denise sells,’ he said sadly, as one of the assistants brushed past them with another painting.
‘It’s perfect,’ breathed Kohler. ‘The eighteen million is handed over to the Reichsmarschall and with it he buys what she has to sell and the loot is shipped to the Reich.’
St-Cyr heaved a patriot’s sigh, a detective’s condemnation of the perfidies of humankind. ‘Worthless francs that can’t be sent out of France because they’re of no value anywhere else; paintings, sculptures and tapestries or carpets that can.’
‘Goering then compensates the Sonderführer back home in the Reich, either by repaying him in Reichsmarks that are sound, or he sells what he doesn’t want and gives his cousin the proceeds in Reichsmarks less a little commission.’
It was all so tidy.
‘And Mademoiselle St. Onge gets to keep the francs less sales commissions here so as to improve her credit balance,’ said St-Cyr, watching the woman so intently he hardly heard the auctioneer saying:
‘180,000 francs, going once, mesdames et messieurs, twice, three times and sold to the Reichsmarschall and Reichsführer Goering.’
There was cheering, there was applause—the bargain
was terrific! 9000 Reichskassenscheine, the Occupation marks. Only 9000!
Denise St. Onge felt everyone was staring at her. Ashamed— mortified—she thought of getting up and leaving, of rushing from the room but Goering … Goering was leaning back over the rows of seats, squeezing people out of the way, extending his massive hand to … to shake her own … her own.
‘She cries!’ he boomed in German and laughed hugely. ’Oh Mein Gott, Andreas, I wish others were so easy!’
To show there were no hard feelings, the Dürer went for 2,500,000 francs, an unbelievable price. The fifteenth-century statue of Eve for 2,200,000, the two Vermeers for but a little less.
Goering threw her a look and saw her smile faintly through her tears. He hadn’t forgotten her after all, he had simply wanted the Cranach for himself and would instruct Hofer to sell the rest in the Reich for far more than he had paid. There would be no shortage of buyers at home. The mere fact that he had owned the pieces, if but briefly, made them exceedingly saleable at very high prices.
Manet’s study of a woman and her daughter brought 1,350,000, the torso of the nude with the hat, 1,400,000, and so it went until the 18,000,000 had been spent.
At a pause for refreshment, she nervously drank champagne but spilled some down her front and tried to wipe it away with her fingertips. At intermission, she searched desperately for Franz and Michel, asking several friends and associates if anyone had seen them, but they hadn’t come back from taking care of Marie-Claire, they hadn’t.
* * *
The kitchens, deep in the staggered, dingy cellars of the Ritz Hotel on the place Vendôme, were bedlam. Fires belched beneath copper pots, smoke rose from skillets and skewers, while the under-cooks, the sous-chefs, ran this way and that to the shrieks of the head cook who threw things when not satisfied. A ladle, an artichoke, a cleaver … once a whole bowl of white sauce, the sauce velouté most probably … Tears in its maker’s eyes. Tears!
But the coffee was excellent, the croissants stuffed with Black Forest ham and Edam cheese, with a side dish of radishes, that little touch of home to which only a stein of Münchener Löwen or Würzburger Hofbrau was needed. The milk of Munich.
Kohler wept with nostalgia and pent-up despair, wolfing his supper as if a last meal before the rigours of the Russian Front and the emptiness of Siberia as a prisoner of war in winter or at any other time, ah yes.
‘Louis, we can’t go up against Goering. What’s a few paintings, a few bits of sculpture? Hell, nearly all that stuff at the auction was stolen.’
‘Don’t be stubborn … Is that it, mon vieux?’ asked St-Cyr, reaching for another croissant as the head cook shattered a soup tureen, maintaining that the gold-and-blue-rimmed Sèvres was required—required!—for the supper. Ah merde, a true artiste!
Ducking, Kohler tried to ignore the racket though there were at least forty cooks and a dozen or so plongeurs—dishwashers, damn it! ‘Look, you know what I mean, Louis. Let him have the money, let him have the paintings. All we want is Mademoiselle St. Onge.’
‘And the law, Hermann? What of the law?’
Must they always have this argument? ‘You’re not a priest! You’re not my conscience! Hey, my fine Frog friend, I’m talking about your ass. Yours!’
‘Ass … Yes. Isn’t that what this whole affair is really about? Sex, Hermann? Rape, forced masturbation while under the lens, humiliation and hatred in the guise of “fun”?’
‘Louis, I’m begging you not only for my sake and your own, but for Giselle’s and Oona’s and Gabrielle’s. Goering’s on the downslide. He failed to deliver at Stalingrad. He failed in the Battle for Britain. He has a vicious temper but also …’ Kohler hunched over the table with croissant in hand, ‘but also, mein lieber Franzose, he’s a cold-hearted, cool-headed son of a bitch when he has to be. How the hell else do you suppose he could have won the Blue Max?’
St-Cyr had never seen Hermann like this—oh mais certainement they had run afoul of the SS, the Gestapo, the Wehrmacht authorities many times before and there was the slash of a rawhide whip down his face as a reminder of a case not too distant from this one.
But … but Hermann was right. If challenged, Goering would react as though stung.
As yet the Reichsmarschall was unaware that the Sonderführer and le Blanc were no more, as yet he still believed the money would be handed over to Andreas Hofer tomorrow morning. 1 January 1943.
Marie-Claire de Brisson had planned it all so carefully. Not revenge for having been betrayed by her closest friend and employer, but justice for herself and all those other victims. The truth. The forged papers that were now covered with blood, the money that had been hidden by Kempf and le Blanc in the storeroom behind the shop but had been found by her and rehidden in a disused part of the cellar only to have it recovered by those two after having obtained the new location from her.
The letters to herself detailing in the neatest handwriting everything that had happened. The items Denise had put up for sale, the photographic enlargements Marie-Claire had managed to make from the negatives and had kept hidden until that house had been emptied and abandoned.
‘Louis..’
St-Cyr grimly nodded. ‘We want only the woman, Hermann. The money’s to go to Boemelburg who will, no doubt, turn it over to the Reichsmarschall with our compliments.’
‘Goodwill and all that horseshit,’ mumbled Kohler, reaching across the table to grip him by the hands. ‘Merci, mon vieux. Merci’
They finished their supper amid the bedlam but in silence and when the last of the coffee was gone and Hermann had wiped the sugar from the bottom of his cup with a finger—real sugar—they dodged and weaved among the racing sous-chefs and took themselves upstairs to another kind of bedlam.
‘Oysters au gratin, salmon steaks in cream. Tripe à la mode de Caen, pigs’ feet Sainte-Menehould,’ said St-Cyr, aghast at the contents of the menu in his hand. ‘Quail under embers, Hermann. Breast of chicken with foie gras, goose with sauerkraut, coeur de Charollais à la façon des Dues de Bourbon …’
Fillet of beef Dukes of Bourbon, grumbled Kohler inwardly, thinking of Stalingrad and his two sons, and of Giselle and Oona making do with so little. Potato cream pancakes, cauliflower mousse, leeks of Savoy and … ‘Salmis de Palombe, Louis?’
‘Wild dove in a sauce of red wine. It’s a dish from the Pyrenees. Goering is eating his way through the country like a savage eats the heart and kidneys and unmentionables of a vanquished enemy!’
Grimly Kohler reminded him that it had been Goering who had issued the decree of 26 April 1933 bringing into being the Gestapo and letting them have a branch in every part of the Reich. Goering …
St-Cyr’s nod was curt. ‘Please cover the dining-room exits. Let me find myself a vantage point. Let me see her before she sees us so that I can tell Dédé exactly how her downfall was.’
Once the playground of the rich and famous, the Ritz was now used exclusively by the Wehrmacht. Visiting generals and other high-ranking officers came and went as if stiff, fleet harbingers of an uncertain future. Gravely subdued, they were overly polite to one another. Ignoring as best they could the racket from the main dining-room and the Luftwaffe security types who seemed to be everywhere, these ‘guests’ ducked discreetly into the lounge bar for a quiet drink and to listen to its chanteuse struggle valiantly against the din, or slipped outside to dissociate themselves completely from the Reichsmarschall.
Kohler knew they were embarrassed by the great one’s presence and sensed in them his same fears that it was now only a matter of time until the Third Reich collapsed in disarray.
Louis went up the main staircase, that grand, sweeping curve of crimson and black Savonnerie carpet, the black wrought iron of its remarkable balustrade but bars to the Sûreté who, when he stood in front of a hanging tapestry like no other, looked tough and determined, yet sad.
Committed, he didn’t turn to look back. He paused to let three U-boat captains descend and then he went on up to the first fl
oor to disappear beyond the brass railing of the balustrade. No king, no general, just a cop on business.
Kohler moved away. Two of Goering’s boys followed him and he had to wonder why they hadn’t interfered and thrown Louis and him out of the hotel.
But they hadn’t done so, and that, too, was a worry.
St-Cyr was troubled. The Luftwaffe security men were leaving them alone. As he walked along a corridor King Edward VII of England must have used, he understood he was being watched but allowed to come and go as he pleased.
Had Goering put in a call to Boemelburg? Had the Sturmbannführer filled the Reichsmarschall in on things?
It was a problem he and Hermann didn’t need, for one couldn’t soak up the essence of these last few moments and ferret out the truth when one had to always worry about one’s back.
Twice he thought of turning and telling them to bugger off. Twice he told himself, They’ll only say I have no jurisdiction here.
Yet they were allowing him to proceed.
Built in 1698, and once the Due de Lauzun’s town house, the Ritz had only forty-five guest rooms including its famous Imperial Suite. Not large, quite modest, its success had lain completely in catering exclusively to wealth and fame.
The dining-room was sumptuous, the cuisine always legendary. Beneath glittering chandeliers, amid the din of laughter, loud shouts and much talk, an army of waiters in dinner-jackets moved with precision while a chamber orchestra competed ineffectually against the racket with a sonata from … Beethoven? Was it Beethoven?
Two hundred were seated at one long table, others at island tables. Crowded … the place was packed!
And in the centre of it all sat the Reichsmarschall, gargantuan, florid, resplendent in his white uniform with all his medals. The Iron Cross First Class, the Lion of Zähringen with swords, the Karl Friedrich Order, the Hohenzollern Order Third Class with swords, the Orden Pour le Mérite—the Blue Max—and with the Grosskreux, the Large Iron Cross Hitler had revived especially for him, at the neck. Folds of flesh, short, curly, wavy hair and hands that pawed as he fed himself.
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