Sandman

by J. Robert Janes

  ‘Verdammt, Louis, what better way for Madame Vernet to get back at that husband of hers for fooling around with Liline Chambert!’

  ‘To be cuckolded by a stablehand and part-time mannequin … Ah nom de Dieu, mon vieux, our Madame Vernet must have acid in her veins!’

  ‘A gigolo. The shame of it,’ hooted Kohler. ‘If word gets out, Vernet’s associates will ridicule him into the grave!’

  ‘And beyond it for at least the next two hundred years!’

  ‘But is she pregnant by that stud, and if so, does she not want an heir of her own? Did she arrange to have her niece killed?’

  Ah now, was it not time for the truth? ‘And a marriage, mon vieux, that would have to continue not only because Liline Chambert had been taken care of but because Antoine Vernet could never—I repeat never—claim this other child was not his own, lest his wife tell everyone who the father really was.’ He drew in a breath and sighed. ‘It’s perfect, Hermann. If true, she stands alone in infamy.’

  A sobering thought.

  Nénette Vernet had known she would be followed; Liline Chambert had gone to have her abortion.

  Andrée Noireau had been killed, but that killing had been quite different from the others.

  ‘Where is that kid, Louis? Is she still hiding out in that synagogue? Is she hungry and cold?’

  And still afraid to go home. ‘Or has Julian Rébé now dealt with her, if it was he who killed her little friend? A stableboy.’

  A pack rat, a voyou, Sister Céline had called her. A petty thief of toy giraffes. An amateur sleuth who was convinced not only that she knew who the Sandman was but where and when he would strike next.

  A victim. A target.

  Dawn had broken, and from the flat Hermann had rented on the rue Suger there was a splendid view across place Saint-André-des-Arts towards the river and the Notre-Dame. Sunlight touched the belfries, warming both pigeon and gargoyle. Shadows gave a bluish cast to copper-green roofs whose faded orange chimney pots were so much a part of the Paris St-Cyr loved. But what had that child found up there? he asked himself. The fob of a gold ear-ring, was that it?

  Liline Chambert had been with her, the older girl distracted, afraid of the abortion to come, the sin of it, the danger … ah, so many things would have been going through her mind. Perhaps she had snapped at Nénette and had told her such searchings were crazy, perhaps she had simply waited and had looked out across the river as he did himself. But had that child really discovered who the Sandman was?

  Both of them had known things were not right at the Villa Vernet. Both had seen that things could not go on as they had been.

  Everything in the child’s coat pockets had had meaning for her, but what, really, had she been up to? Tracking the Sandman or trying to trap that aunt of hers or both?

  ‘Jean-Louis, come and eat while it’s hot.’

  ‘Ah! Oona. Forgive me. The flat is pleasant and tastefully furnished. My compliments. I should have paid you a visit long ago but …’ He shrugged. There’d been no time.

  ‘The flea markets are helpful,’ she said, knowing full well that things were not cheap there now and that Jean-Louis thought her the anchor that would keep Hermann from the storm when Giselle pulled out.

  She was tall and blonde and blue-eyed, a pleasant—yes, pleasant-looking forty-year-old, she thought. Well, almost forty-one—but with a welcome bank account of common sense the Sûreté admired. And, yes, she could have had the pick of the Occupier—he knew this, too—but knew also she would settle for a ménage à trois that was not always easy. A patriot, an alien without proper papers. A woman who had fallen in love with his partner but was still too afraid to openly tell Hermann of it or give too many outward signs for fear of upsetting Giselle.

  ‘Tarot cards,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a reading.’

  On the kitchen table she had placed the miserable loaf of grey bread that was their daily ration if they could get it. The bowl of muddied ersatz coffee had no sugar or milk. The flat was freezing, but it was home, and he saw her smile softly before raising her eyebrows in question and saying, ‘Tarot cards?’

  ‘Ah yes.’ He fanned out the six of them and passed his fingers over them as a clairvoyant would. ‘The Star can mean abandonment,’ he said. ‘We’ll let it.’

  ‘And the Lover?’ she asked. ‘It can mean just that if you wish.

  ‘I do. The Nine of Swords implies deception and despair, among other things.’

  ‘Shame, in the reverse, and imprisonment—Giselle has been teaching me.’

  ‘The Devil,’ he said of yet another card. ‘It can mean violence—blindness if reversed. Those and other things.’

  She set her coffee down and urged him to drink his. ‘And the Eight of Swords?’ she said. ‘It shows a young woman bound and blindfolded under swords that are ready to plunge into her. Is she the girl who …’

  ‘That card is bad news, also sickness and other things, but in the reverse it can mean treachery, and that is what Nénette Vernet must have felt it meant for Liline Chambert and for herself.’

  Treachery … They ate in silence, trying to savour each morsel while picking out the unmentionable and questionable sweepings that had found their way into the flour. ‘And this one?’ asked Oona of another card.

  ‘The Ace of Swords. What would Madame Rébé have said of it?’

  ‘That it is a very powerful card both in love and in hatred and that it can mean, among other things, triumph or triumph by force.’

  ‘And in the reverse?’ he asked.

  Again he would seek only to have the card read as the child must have done. ‘Conception, Jean-Louis Childbirth and disaster.’

  Swiftly he reached across the table to grip her by the hand. She had lost her children on the trek from Holland during the Blitzkrieg of 1940 and knew only too well the pain of their loss. They and her husband had gone to beg water at a farmer’s well. The price had been far beyond their meager resources but they had been so thirsty they had hung around, begging. Then the Stukas had come, and then the Messerschmitts, and everyone had run for cover.

  In the terror that had followed, she and her husband had been unable to find their children and now he, too, was dead—a month ago. Was it as long as that? The French Gestapo of the rue Lauriston, a carousel and yet another murder. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘One is constantly reminding oneself to be careful what one says and does, but even so … Oona, your children may still be alive. You must always hope that someday they will be returned to you.’

  ‘They’re gone. I know they are. A mother feels such things. They’re buried by the roadside in unmarked graves, and it’s an emptiness within me that will never go away.’

  With his usual boisterousness, Hermann returned from using the telephone in the café down the street and said, ‘I held back on an all-points for Rébé simply because the SS-Attack Leader and artist Gerhardt Hasse is at home and expecting us, Louis, thanks to von Schaumburg. His friends over on the avenue Foch will try to shield him. They’re worried about his interest in young girls. Apparently he can’t get enough of them.’

  Oh-oh.

  Giselle wandered into the kitchen bundled in two overcoats, trousers, three pairs of Hermann’s woollen socks, scarves, a toque and mittens. ‘It’s freezing in here,’ she said and pouted, having just got out of bed. ‘God is punishing me for cohabiting with the Occupier, especially one who is so patriotic towards the Conquered he will not ask for even a simple ration of coal!’

  ‘Giselle …’

  ‘Hermann, a moment,’ cautioned Oona, and, taking the girl by the shoulders, sat her down at the table and began to warm coffee for her on the tiny hotplate that served for all cooking.

  ‘What do those tell you?’ asked the girl suspiciously of the Tarot cards.

  ‘Trouble,’ said the Sûreté, quickly gathering them up. ‘Much trouble.’

  7

  THE IMPASSE MAUBERT WAS ONE OF THOSE narrow, dead-end streets that so delight the eye yet terrify
the timid. Not far to the east of place Saint-André-des-Arts, and right near the quai de Montebello, it was not clean but was a half-hidden slot overtowered by ramshackle houses, some of which dated from the twelfth century. Walls were bowed out or in and all but naked of their covering plaster. Iron grilles defied entry, though not a shutter was in place. A street, then, of Balzac or Dumas, thought St-Cyr, with embrasures at eye level for the discharge of muskets.

  But what struck the heart as they walked up the alley was the sight of a Daimler sedan facing them. Big, black, powerful and so obviously SS that Hermann hesitated.

  A motorcycle courier had parked his bike just in front of the car and to the left. Narrow pavements on either side allowed only one person at a time to pass, and the house beyond that thing at the very end of the impasse rose up four storeys, windows two by two like an ancient god of warning.

  ‘Vouvray …’ said Hermann and, pulling off a glove, gingerly felt the scar on his left cheek. What had begun as a nothing murder in the Forest of Fontainebleau had ended with their being hated by the SS.

  And now here, again, they were coming face to face with the bastards. Berlin wouldn’t like it, the avenue Foch would be in a rage—’Hey, that’s why the courier’s here,’ he said. ‘Oberg’s sent a love note to our friend ordering him to say nothing.’

  Oberg was head of the SS in France, a former banana merchant, now with the power of life and death over everyone, themselves included.

  They went on, each taking a side of the car, Hermann forgetting all about the glove he had removed. The car was ice-cold but utterly clean and so at odds with the street they threw a last look at it over a shoulder.

  There was no lift. Mon Dieu, in a house like this, how could there be? But the staircase was steep and the sounds of their steps were many.

  No concierge bothered them. That one had simply vanished.

  The atelier was on the top floor. The door was open, their progress up the impasse had been observed, and at once the smell of turpentine, oil paints and canvas assaulted the nostrils.

  Hasse had been busy. Stacks of canvases leant against whatever they could … a table leg, a wall, a chair. Others were hanging on the walls, masses of subdued colour, all greyish, all of smiling, laughing young girls of ten or twelve or fourteen years of age, no others.

  He signed for whatever it was Oberg had sent over, and with the customary salute, the courier departed, contempt for them in the man’s every look. Ah merde …

  ‘Gentlemen, it’s good of you to pay me a visit. Come … come, please, yes? There are chairs somewhere. Uncover them—just set things aside or put them on the floor. At this time of day I have to have the light. You won’t mind, I’m sure.’

  Like a stork that urgently searches for its chimney upon which to nest, Hasse went through to the front of the house to a room so cluttered with canvases, brushes, rags, spatulas, palettes and tubes of paint, trays on trays of them, he could not at first decide where the chairs must be.

  Then he found them and, uncovered at last, they were usable.

  The stand-up easel he had been working at—one of several—held a half-finished sketch whose faces they could not fail to recognize.

  There, as in life but in those same subdued tones, were Andrée Noireau and Nénette Vernet, an arm about each other’s shoulders, laughing, having just thought up the greatest of jokes. They were running a three-legged race against themselves. The windblown leaves of October were everywhere.

  ‘What has happened is a tragedy,’ he said. ‘I find I cannot bring myself to finish this painting.’

  The Sandman … was he the Sandman?

  The stork was tall and thin, all bones and with gaunt grey eyes that looked beyond the painting into the past, to Poland and the Blitzkrieg in the East and children running in the streets through shellfire until dead.

  ‘I have to work,’ he said, pleading for understanding. ‘Someone has to record their moment. Otherwise life is far too short.’

  The black, receding hair was brushed straight back from the brow, the cheeks were thin, the lower lip much thicker than the upper. The nose was full and sharp; a once battle-hardened, very, very tough man. A killer now reduced to this.

  He was from Salzburg and, without being asked, readily admitted there was a concentration camp there for Gypsies and that he had sent children to it, children he had sketched. ‘It wasn’t right of me, no matter what the Führer says.’

  Louis found his voice. The SS things the child had found had not come from the house on the rue Chabanais but from here … ‘Is that why you let Nénette Vernet have some of your badges and medals?’

  Stung, Hasse turned on him. ‘Why ask when I have just told vou I could not possibly want those things anymore?’

  The scars were there but no wounds were visible. Instead Hasse emanated shell shock. Like a tripwire tied taut across a lonely forest road, he waited for the bomb within himself to explode.

  ‘What can I tell you?’ he asked. His fingers trembled.

  ‘Are you under doctor’s orders?’ asked Louis.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Morphine?’ asked Kohler. ‘Alcohol?’

  ‘Don’t be impertinent! All I need is to sketch. My work absorbs me.’ He gave a wry laugh. ‘What better escape than that of the artist? The world, but for the work at hand, has to be shut out, otherwise the piece simply does not get done and can never be satisfactory.’

  ‘Tell us what you can about Liline Chambert,’ offered Louis, trying to be diplomatic.

  Already they were suspicious of him, thought Hasse. Both were ill at ease, as they should be with the SS! ‘She was lonely and distressed about money and other things, and knew I was no threat to her. She did find it hard to reconcile my killing of children—yes, I admit it and did so to her. It was in conflict with my sketches but she understood I had suffered greatly. We met in a life-drawing class at the Grande-Chaumière. The mannequins on that day were children—three boys and a girl—but I had drawn only the girl. She said I had captured the child’s apprehension, the worry in her eyes over her brothers who often strayed from their poses and fidgeted far too much for the drawing master. Their mother badly needed the pittance they would be paid, and the child was afraid it would not be forthcoming. Even at such a tender age, she had understood her duty.’

  Again it was Louis who, lost in thought and wary, said, ‘But you sketched only her.’

  ‘Because I only want to paint young girls, Inspector.’

  Ah merde, did Hasse feel it necessary to be so forthright? ‘And Liline?’ he asked, looking up at the unfinished canvas.

  Hasse was conscious of Louis’s every expression. He was really very alert—too alert, thought Kohler.

  ‘We both taught a junior class at the Musée en Herbe—one has to do things like that. Children—yes, yes, I teach some of those who come to the Jardin d’Acclimatation. I did not kill any of them. I wouldn’t. I’ve had enough of that. Look, I know it doesn’t sound good, but …’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve always wanted nothing more than this.’ He indicated the clutter, and when what must have been one of the quarter’s most torn-eared of strays leapt into his lap, welcomed it.

  ‘I thought I could secure for Liline a commission for the Linz Museum. A wounded SS being assisted from the rubble of Stalingrad perhaps. I don’t know. Something to get her a bit of money and the freedom she needed.’

  ‘Freedom from whom?’ asked Louis. Herr Hasse’s French was very good.

  ‘From Vernet, who else?’ Did they not know of it? wondered Hasse. ‘He wanted to divorce his wife and marry her. She hated living in that house. If it hadn’t been for Nénette, she would have left long ago.’

  To divorce his wife and marry her … Ah merde, thought St-Cyr. Madame Vernet must have known of it.

  ‘Nénette needed Liline?’ asked Kohler pleasantly enough.

  ‘The child’s parents were dead. The bombing of Coventry …’ said Hasse.

  ‘Yet the child could laugh as she pos
ed for you, a member of the Occupying Forces?’ asked St-Cyr.

  Ah, damn this one, thought Hasse. ‘I work from photographs. I have a camera with a telephoto lens. The girls did not know I was taking their picture.’

  When the photograph was found, it wasn’t the only one. Girls of from eight to fourteen had been caught in the Jardin d’Acclimatation, on the pony rides, at the puppet theatres, even on the steps of the restaurant and, yes, thought Kohler grimly, even near the cage of doves and the clay-pigeon shoot.

  It was Louis who, holding several snapshots not of Nénette or Andrée but of others, said accusingly, ‘That is the Lycée Fénelon in the background, Herr Hasse. The oldest girls’ school in Paris is but a few blocks from here and just off the rue de l’Eperon.’

  There was no need to tell them anything, thought Hasse. Oberg had stated this very clearly, but Oberg was not here to dictate what would or would not be said.

  They were both looking at him. A photograph slipped and fell but the Hauptmann Kohler patently ignored it. Had he deliberately dropped the thing so as to unsettle him? Of course he had. ‘I … I walk over to the lycée nearly every day—usually at noon, after the lunch break. There’s a soup kitchen in the cellars run by some nuns. The girls come up and hang about for a few minutes if it’s not too cold. Before, in the early fall, they would skip and play hopscotch. There are shots of their skirts flying up.’ He stabbed at the photos. ‘Look, if you must. I’m sure you’ll see their bony knees. I know it must seem damning, but you have to understand the artist seeks only the absolute truth of each moment.’

  There were schoolgirls and schoolgirls and then … ‘That snapshot of Andrée and Nénette, Inspectors. It was taken in the early fall in the jardin. Liline saw me take it, and it was then that I asked if she could bring the girls to pose for me.’

  Kohler had no longing for a cigarette. Hasse electrified the air with unspoken accusations and denials: I KNOW YOU THINK I DID IT, BUT I DIDN’T!

  It was Louis who tidied the photographs and searched among the faces. Were the Sandman’s other victims there? he wondered. ‘You must have made preliminary sketches of Nénette and Andrée, Herr Hasse,’ he said. ‘If it would not be too much trouble, we would like a look at them.’