Sandman

by J. Robert Janes

  ‘Louis, take a look at this.’

  By the tone of voice, Hermann had betrayed his sorrow. The beam of his torch faltered. He shook the thing and it came on a little stronger.

  In the paintings, in corpse after corpse, schoolgirls of perhaps eleven to fifteen or sixteen years of age lay about the floor of a gymnasium. All naked, all lying there, just lying there.

  Trapped … they’d been herded in and forced to strip and their screams, their cries rose up from the paintings as one.

  They shut their eyes. They switched off their torches. It was Hermann who, breathing in deeply, said, ‘Ah, Gott im Himmel, Louis, it has to be him.’

  How many had been violated only then to be shot down and silenced forever except for this? In painting after painting Hasse had recorded their demise, the triumph of war unleashed on children. All girls.

  ‘Let’s go and pick him up.’

  ‘Oberg isn’t going to like it,’ said the Sûreté.

  ‘That can’t be helped.’

  The cat was at its saucer of milk. A tin of sardines had been emptied for it into another saucer, enough to feed a child and keep it alive for a week at least.

  When the creature left its supper to find a radiator near the front windows, they saw it licking something and then playfully pawing at it and licking its claws.

  A black cat with mucus-clotted sea-green eyes. A mangy, torn-eared thing.

  ‘Chewing gum,’ breathed Kohler. ‘Louis, it hasn’t been here long.’

  There was a packet of the stuff on the cluttered coffee table among the jars of paintbrushes soaking in turpentine or standing upright and ready. ‘Banana,’ he said, reading the ersatz flavour, one of so many that had been concocted and mixed with saccharin to tempt the taste buds of a defeated nation and keep the memory or the hope of better times alive.

  In a land of approximate jam, mystery meat and non-alcoholic near-wine, port or Pernod, flavour was seldom totally captured, only reinvented, but kids would chew on this stuff anyway, especially if offered it and they wanted to calm their nerves. Ah yes.

  ‘She sat in this chair, Louis. There are dried oak leaves on the cushions.’

  So there were, and some had all but been crumbled to dust while others still held their shape. Had they worked their way out of the coat lining they had stuffed? Had they come from a bouquet Hasse had set near his easel, upon which sat the unfinished sketch of Andrée Noireau and Nénette?

  ‘Hasse has used the leaves as models for those the girls are kicking in their three-legged race,’ said Louis. ‘They may not be from the child’s coat, Hermann. Indeed, I don’t think they are, but perhaps he has held a few as he thought about those girls before crumbling them to dust’

  ‘Then how about this, eh?’ demanded Kohler harshly. He held out a child’s tooth-brush, its bristles well-worn and all but flattened. The torchlight shone on it.

  Louis took the thing from him and read the name the manufacturer had given it.’ “The Little Princess, fabricated in Lodz.” The Blitzkrieg in the East, September of thirty-nine. Ah merde …’

  Nénette could have bought it on the black market, but that didn’t seem likely even though the whole of Occupied Europe was awash with the debris of war. More likely Hasse had found it for her and she had forgotten to take it with her, or he had simply had it out to remind himself of what had happened in the gymnasium.

  ‘And this?’ snapped Kohler, shining his torch on the thing. ‘A sketch map of the Jardin d’Acclimatation, Louis. The riding trails they followed, the stables, dressage grounds, pigeon-shoot and cage, ah damn.’

  ‘All with the distances marked off. The puppet theatres, the children’s zoo, the restaurant with its salon de thé, the Musée en Herbe where he and Liline Chambert taught.’

  ‘“Sunday 10 January at about 3.20 p.m.” He’s got that written down too. The cemetery, Louis, the convent school. Ah Gott im Himmel, mon vieux, what the hell are we to do?’

  Sickened by the thought, they had no other choice but to continue. They had to find Julien Rébé, of course. They had not forgotten him. It was only that the SS had inadvertently put Hasse foremost in their minds by trying to shield Debauve and save that bastard from arrest.

  They had to find Violette Belanger, they had to find Nénette.

  And when all of that was done, or before it, they had to talk to Sister Céline. They had to find the Sandman.

  Montpamasse was alive in darkness. At the carrefour Vavin, the intersection of the boulevards Raspail and du Montpamasse, the firefly-glows of hustling cigarettes and probing torch pinpricks were turbulent. The great brasseries of the late 1920s and before, the Dôme, the Rotunde, Sélect and Coupole, were all doing a roaring business. Troops eddied and flowed, staff cars emitted tiny, piercing beams from their headlamps, there was much honking among the vélo-taxis, the gazogènes and ancient, nag-drawn calèches. Lorries brought the boys in. Later the Feld-gendarmen and the Paris gendarmes would either lock them in each establishment at curfew or drag them back to their Soldatenheime.

  Girls stood on the street corners. Girls sold themselves in the freezing cold. In desperation, for it was against the law for her to make the approaches but okay if the man went to her, one banged on the Citroën’s side window. Louis rolled it down a centimetre.

  Not realizing to whom she was speaking, she said, ‘I will do anything, monsieur. Anything.’

  Kohler avoided argument by leaning over Louis to stuff a 100-franc note through the gap and tell her to go home. ‘You’ll only catch the flu.’

  ‘I already have it!’

  The window closed. They nudged on ahead, the acid of ‘Must you waste our money?’ ringing in the driver’s ears. They tried to pass a disgorging lorry. Sailors beat upon the car, hooting, shouting, rocking it until the accelerator was touched.

  The boulevard du Montpamasse was pitch-black but through this the white metal studs of a passage clouté, a pedestrian crossing, glowed eerily. A whistle was blown.

  ‘Turn here,’ said Louis.

  ‘It’s one further.’

  ‘Idiot! How long have you lived in this city?’

  ‘Okay, you win! Don’t get so uptight.’

  The Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where sculpture and painting had been taught since 1904, was at Number 14. It was a street that, in the 1830s and ’40s, Louis Philippe had frequented, dining and playing nearby in a dance hall—one could call it no other—which sadly was no more, thought St-Cyr. Well, no matter. If not the boulevard du Montpamasse, then the clubs, the bars and cinemas of the rue de la Gaîtè, the rue Delambre, ah yes, and others. Yet here it was reasonably quiet. Here the steam had not yet been released from a boiler of a different kind.

  No one could have been less intelligent or more desperate for money than Julien Rébé. The fortune-teller’s son was the mannequin. The drawing studio was huge, antiquated, panelled in darkly stained tongue-and-groove cedar and, because of the electricity outage, lighted by kerosene lamps that smoked. It was crowded and stepped down in tiers, while a balcony above was reserved for those who wished only to think about art as a life’s work and could dwell on the subject from rows of wooden benches. Far below them, the budding artists stood or sat and the scratches of their charcoal sticks on drawing paper rose up to fill the hall. Now a cough, of course, for it was the season for them. Now a quiet exchange with the drawing master, now a look, a line, a scratch, a rubbing with the thumb to shade and work the charcoal in.

  Kohler heard Louis lightly tap the brass railing that kept them back from the precipice. ‘Down there. To the far left. Herr Hasse, but he is not sketching our mannequin. He’s working on something of his own.’

  Two flics, one a giant, were far too conspicuous. They sat down. They took off their fedoras but kept their overcoats on. More than half the students were men of the Occupier and most were in uniform. All were bent on sketching, all were very serious about it. Laced among them there were a few older Frenchmen, many more women, some of the grey m
ice but most French. Old, young, lots of the not so young, the lonely whose husbands were locked up in prisoner-of-war camps or eternally in the arms of death.

  A discus thrower Julien Rébé was not—well, not tonight. Tonight he was the standard bearer who clutched his staff and wore a Roman centurion’s expression but nothing else.

  He had a good body, was of medium height and well proportioned, lithe and muscular, with lots of dark reddish brown hair on his legs, groin and chest, far less of it on his head, for he’d saved money and had had the haircut of haircuts. It was not the Fritz-cut of the Occupier. It was far shorter. A bristlework for the ladies to rub.

  He had started to grow a beard but it simply made the narrow face, high forehead and deeply sunken eyes look damned scruffy, though somewhat older perhaps than his twenty-six years. Two of the kerosene lamps stood on the dais before him, one on either side. The only heat in the place, of course, was from those lamps and from the students.

  The girls, the women with fingerless gloves, were attracted to him and had obviously arrived early, since most of the nearest positions had been taken up by them. Rébé, though he held his pose, was still free to seek and maintain eye contact with some of them. There would be smiles, demurely affected or boldly provocative, given by some of the women but not visible from up here. Unspoken exchanges. Slender hopes perhaps or silently-agreed-upon assignations.

  ‘That clairvoyant mother of his must have looked in her crystal ball and then thrown him out without a sou, Louis.’

  ‘And disowned him. At break-time he will go into the corridor to where his clothes are and will try to use them to get warm.’

  ‘I’ll tie them in knots, shall I?’

  ‘Herr Hasse seems not to care about him at all.’

  Was the centurion so completely without conscience or so desperate he could ignore the killing of Andrée Noireau, or had he silenced Nénette and now thought he had no further worries? And what, please, then, of the Attack Leader who now spoke quietly to the drawing master?

  Rébé heard two of the young women giggle. There was a faint murmur, another giggle, a hand to a mouth, a burst of ribald feminine laughter. One old man threw down his charcoal in disgust and cried out, ‘Shut your mouths, you silly bitches! Let those who wish to work do so.’

  Rébé had noticed them up in the balcony. Unbidden, the erection he had been thinking about because of some attractive woman had suddenly become a strong reality. In panic, he turned and bolted from the dais, tripped, went down hard, knocked an easel over, and fled. There were hoots of laughter, much thrown charcoal, dismay on the part of some, and a sketch torn to shreds and offered up as a confetti.

  He was trying to drag on his trousers when Kohler slammed him against a wall and put the bracelets on him.

  Grabbing him by the neck, he pitched him back into the drawing studio, where the students now stood and gaped or sat still, not wanting to believe their centurion had been arrested.

  ‘Hasse,’ swore St-Cyr, moving up the tiers, knocking things over. ‘Hasse …’

  The easel was there, a tin of pencils, one of charcoal sticks … little else but a small rag and an eraser.

  Out on the street, they heard the Attack Leader’s car join the traffic on the boulevard du Montpamasse.

  The drawing he had been working on was not of Andrée Noireau but of Nénette Vernet and obviously done from memory. She did not smile. The silent scream she gave leapt from the sketch. Her sealskin hat had fallen off, the overcoat padded with leaves was buttoned up. She looked an urchin, a child caught up in a war zone. The Blitzkrieg in the East and Poland … Poland …

  ‘Come on, Louis. Let’s take this one to where he won’t cause trouble any more, then we’ll go after Hasse.’

  The look in Rébé’s greeny-brown eyes was empty of all feeling, of all conscience. Staring straight back at them, he refused to say a thing.

  ‘Good. That is as it should be,’ said the Sûreté softly. ‘Save it all for when you face Madame Vernet. We’ll let her accuse you, then maybe you will accuse her and the child you share can cement the relationship by giving you both away.’

  ‘The heiress is dead. He killed her. The one you chased. The German.’

  They could not leave Rébé in the cells of the rue des Saussaies for fear the SS would silence him to protect Hasse, they couldn’t call for a salad basket and request a guided tour of the Santé Prison, not just yet.

  They would have to leave him somewhere safe.

  ‘The Club Mirage,’ breathed Louis. ‘The Corsicans can take care of him. It’ll be their contribution. It’s time they did something useful.’

  ‘Is the kid really dead, Louis?’

  ‘Ah, let us hope this one was lying to save himself.’

  ‘I wasn’t. I saw the German in the Jardin d’Acclimatation this afternoon. He was following Nénette. She got into his car.’

  Ah no …

  The lion was tame. He had had his canines and his claws pulled but still could inspire unease, for he was uncaged and nervous when there was too much shouting, and eight hundred servicemen on leave did tend to make noise.

  The Club Mirage was on the rue Delambre—just a brie hustle from the Gande-Chaumière and convenient even in the dark, but now there was light, now the thirsty thronged the zinc Now eighteen all but naked women who should have been ashamed kicked their gams and thrust their bare bottoms at the troops as the band hit everything it had and the clarinetist pinched his reed and blew the highest possible C.

  It was deafening, and under normal circumstances Kohler would have grinned and lapped it up from the front-centre table he had appropriated by kicking others out. He fed the lion a titbit, some salty ersatz thing the troops seemed to gorge on with their beer. He said, ‘Nice pussy, rest your head in Prisoner Rébé’s lap. Yes … yes, that’s just the way. Uncle Hermann has to find us another beer.’

  The lion’s handler was wrapped in narrow straps of gold satin that let her skin breathe a little too much on the flimsy bed she and the lion shared on stage among other things, but it was a nice outfit all the same. Blonde and blue-eyed, with extra long lashes, she was about forty-five, had had three kids, and was trying desperately to make enough to feed them and get on with her career as a torch singer.

  ‘Bijou, I won’t be a minute,’ said Kohler kindly, even though he was really worried. Ja, really worried. ‘If the son of a bitch farts, slap him for me. If he bolts, tell Hercules here to bring him back. If the lion is too tired, I’ll have my shooter out before this one gets to the doors, no matter what the crowd want to do with him. Right, eh, Julien?’ The guns had been under the seat of the car.

  Now clothed but still handcuffed, Rébé had wet himself. The lion was refusing to rest his head in the stableboy’s lap but was curious.

  ‘Naughty, naughty,’ said Kohler. ‘Champagne, was it, Bijou?’ Christ, the champagne in this place was usually owl piss.

  The lady nodded. The throng at the zinc parted easily, for by now they were certain, without having been told a thing, that the Sandman had been apprehended, and if Herr Kohler should turn his head, they would tear Rébé to pieces.

  Rémi Rivard, the taller of the two Corsicans who owned the club and worked the pumps, was not happy. The face that was all clefts, crags, blackheads and paralysing cliffs was grim. The jet-black greasy hair was that of a gangster, the barrel chest that of the Marseillais stevedore and smuggler he had once been, though both were still vehemently denied under the happy guise of having been ‘a fisherman’.

  The Corsican had caught the temper of the crowd. ‘Okay,’ he breathed, leaning over the zinc when he saw Kohler returning for an answer, ‘take the bastard out back and wire him to the pipes. Let him freeze to death. That way he won’t wear out the bread-slicer.’

  ‘Worried, are you, about your own neck and a nice clean cut, eh?’ snorted the opposition. ‘I told you what we want. A small favour in return for our magnanimous custom. We need him to sing. So, soften him up with the li
on, eh? Let us lock the two of them in a closet.’

  ‘Bijou might not like it.’

  She would be a few acts short and would lose money. Ruefully Kohler dragged out the remains of the bankroll he had once had on the Breton coast and found two miserable five-hundred-franc notes. ‘There’ll be more. Hey, I’ll make it five thousand each and another ten for her.’ Rivard stank of onions, fish, olive oil, garlic and peppers and the smell was nearly as bad as that of the lion, though different, of course.

  ‘Why should we trust you?’ he asked.

  ‘You don’t need to. Your chanteuse will okay it.’

  ‘You must really want him.’

  ‘We do.’

  ‘Then walk him out of here, my fine detective. Bring him back inside via the courtyard, eh? Use your head. Gabrielle will let you keep him in her dressing room. That way, if the SS and the Gestapo want to keep him silent, she’ll be responsible.’

  ‘Now look …’

  Rivard held up a hand signaling finality. ‘That’s how it is because that’s how it has to be. She has friends we don’t have. Generals, people in high places. Others who can take care of things for her if necessary.’

  The Resistance … Kohler knew that was who Rivard meant and nodded. It would have to do, but Louis wasn’t going to like it, especially since the dressing room had been bugged by Gestapo Paris’s Listeners, though the Rivard brothers weren’t supposed to know this and neither was anyone else.

  Nothing had been said yet in the tiny dressing room into which St-Cyr had slipped after first quietly knocking. His nostrils still taking in the scent of Mirage, that exquisitely delicate perfume Gabrielle always wore—it had been made especially for her—he stood hesitantly facing her.

  Trouble … we’ve really got trouble this time, his look seemed to say.

  She touched her lips again, a reminder of the hidden microphones, and silently formed the words, Things, they are not good here either. The Gestapo still suspect me but of what I do not know.

  Ah merde. Perhaps they had picked up someone connected to the tiny Resistance cell to which she belonged and that person had said something, perhaps they only thought to monitor her since she knew so many big shots among the Occupier and the Occupied.