Sandman

by J. Robert Janes

  She was, as Turcotte had so viciously stated, of Rumanian descent – at least, it would have been thought by those in authority that she had been born there. She’d have let them think what they wanted, knowing only that she had again fooled them.

  Her real name was Tshaya. She was dark-haired, strongly featured and quite striking, but in the expression she had last given the police camera, there was deceitfulness, wilfulness, hatred … ah! so many things, and a depth of sadness which went well beyond her years.

  The hair was parted in the middle, blue-black, long and glossy. Loosened strands trailed provocatively across the forehead, enhancing allure and all but hiding the ears which would have held gold rings or coins, though these must have been taken from her.

  The eyes were large and dark beneath strong brows. The nose was full and prominent, the lips not parted. The face was what one would call a medium oval, the chin not pointed but determined, the throat full.

  They had put her age at twenty-eight in August 1941. She would not have argued. Again such Gaje things meant little. For the gypsies, life was of the present, not of the past or of the future, alas.

  Someone – her conductor perhaps – had tersely written in: Of the Lowara tribe. Daughter of the horse trader, Tshurkina la Marako, deported to Buchenwald 14 September 1941.

  She had stayed behind and they had had their reasons for keeping her. Perhaps she had escaped for a time – there was no record of it. But they had used her.

  Colour of skin: dark brown. Height: 1 metre, 68 centimetres. Weight: 62 kilos. Length of arms, length of legs, bust measurement, waist, that of the hips, the wrists and ankles – all such things were given in the tiniest of handwriting, especially the shape and size of the ears, for like fingerprints, the ears remained the same throughout life.

  Signes particuliers: whipmarks on rear of thighs, buttocks, back, shoulders and upper arms, all dating from the summer of 1928 when she’d have been fifteen years old, if the age of twenty-eight was correct, which it probably wasn’t.

  Her father? he wondered but thought it highly unlikely. Banishment for a time, perhaps, if the offence, such as stealing the gold of another, warranted it, not a savage beating.

  But someone had tied her wrists to a post or tree and had let the whip do the rest.

  Hermann was no stranger to this sort of thing and his mood darkened when told of it. Instinctively he gingerly felt his left cheek. That scar was the measure of truth over loyalty to one’s peers, and it ran from just below the eye to his lower jaw.

  The SS had done that to him. What had begun as a ‘nothing’ murder in Fontainebleau Forest, a commonplace murder, had ended at a château near Vouvray as a far different matter not two months ago. The scar was more than matched by the one that ran beneath his shirt from the right shoulder to the left hip. They were still being held accountable for pointing the finger, still reviled, distrusted and held suspect by both the SS of the avenue Foch and the Gestapo of the rue des Saussaies.

  ‘She’s e gajo rom, Hermann – married to a non-gypsy, Henri Doucette. There’s a notation at the bottom of the card.’

  ‘Not the Spade?’

  ‘The same. Once touted as our answer to the Americans’ Gene Tunney. A major contender for the heavyweight championship in 1928 though no fight was held that year, and still, I think, the work-out man at the Avia Club Gym over behind the Porte Saint-Martin unless he’s found more lucrative things to do.’

  The rue Lauriston perhaps? The notorious French Gestapo that was made up of gangsters the SS had let out of jail immediately after the Defeat to make ‘collections’ among other things.

  ‘Let’s go and have a word with him. Let’s stuff a rawhide whip down his throat before we cut off his balls.’

  ‘There’s no mention of his being responsible for this.’

  ‘Then he’ll tell us, right? and he’ll have nothing to worry about.’

  Chez Rudi’s was just across the Champs-Élysées from the Lido. Everyone knew of it, and those who could not eat here or anywhere else would linger beyond the front windows watching those inside.

  It being mid-morning, no meals were being served because lunch was being prepared, but all around them the Occupier came and went, many in uniform, most with their newspapers. Pariser Zeitung, the Völkischer Beobachter – Hitler’s own paper, or Signal, his picture magazine. Le Matin, too, and others. All controlled because that was the way things were.

  The café filtre was black and strong and excellent when taken with two lumps of sugar. Real sugar and twice in the same day!

  ‘I saw that, Louis. You slid four of those sugars into your pocket. You know Rudi doesn’t like the customers when they take things. Put them back.’

  A nod would suffice. Hermann turned to look over a shoulder, as indicated. There were four of them with their faces pressed to the glass. ‘Why aren’t they in school?’ he blurted.

  ‘Perhaps the schools are closed due to the lack of coal.’

  ‘It’s not my fault.’

  ‘No it isn’t but if you expect me to eat in a place like this, try to understand that it is difficult for me.’

  Kohler grabbed four thick slices of bread. Butter, honey and plum jam were added, some cheese also, he piling the slices up on a napkin and calling out to the kitchen, ‘Rudi, I’ve got to do this!’

  The kids took the bread and ran, and he stood in the grey light with the snow swirling around him as he watched in despair, his feelings hurt because they hadn’t even thanked him.

  ‘They called me a dirty Kraut, Louis. They spat at me and said spring would come but that it was taking a long time.’

  Parisians the city over were saying this, spring being the end of the Occupation and of the Occupier.

  ‘I was thinking of my boys,’ he said, looking at the jam on his fingers.

  ‘And I wasn’t thinking. Forgive me.’

  A shadow fell over them. ‘It’s such a small world, isn’t it?’ fluted Rudi Sturmbacher, noting the file card beside St-Cyr and then comparing the scars with the largest of those on the cheek of the Kripo’s most errant Detektiv. ‘They say hers glisten when oiled and that, by the time the Spade was done with her, the dress and blouse were in shreds yet she remained defiant.’

  The Spade …

  At 166 kilos, Rudi was the centre of all gossip, Chez Rudi’s a minefield of it. The flaxen hair was so fine it blew about every time he moved and was therefore closely trimmed. The florid cheeks were smooth and round and netted with the blue-black veins of too much good living, the pale blue eyes wary, sharp and swift to greed, sex or larceny.

  ‘Who’s oiling her?’ asked Kohler blithely.

  The puffy eyelids widened beneath their thick thatches of ripened flax. ‘No one at the moment but there are those who are so fascinated by her scars, they want her back.’

  ‘Sit down,’ said Kohler. ‘Hey, rest a while and tell us what the airwaves are saying about the Ritz, Cartier’s and the Gare Saint-Lazare.’

  The big lips were compressed. A floury hand was wiped on an apron that had seen use since well before dawn, though Rudi often changed them and it must be due to the shortages that he hadn’t.

  ‘Well?’ asked Kohler.

  ‘The airwaves …’ A steaming bowl of sauerkraut and sausage was brought, a little mid-morning sustenance.

  Rudi cut off a slice of sausage and examined it. These two could be useful. ‘Information for information, are we agreed?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Louis.

  They were desperate, then, and still very much on the run, and that could be good or bad depending on the whereabouts and accessibility of the loot, all 50-70,000,000 of it and taken in one night. The talk of the town.

  St-Cyr would never agree to anything in spite of his having said, ‘Of course.’ Rudi fed the slice of sausage to Hermann. ‘That sous-directeur of Cartier’s overlooked a sapphire-bead-and-cabo-chon necklace with oriental pearls and South African diamonds to the value of 250,000 Reichskassenscheine.’ />
  5,000,000 francs. ‘Anything else?’ managed the sausage-eater.

  ‘A sapphire and diamond bracelet with five rows of square-cut, deep blue sapphires, then a row of clear white diamonds on either side. Three hundred and seventy-five blue ones, each exactly the same; one hundred and fifty of the white. One of a kind.’

  They waited. Hermann was fed another bit of sausage and then a forkful of sauerkraut, the juice running down his chin and Rudi dabbing at it with a napkin so as not to mess the tablecloth.

  ‘100,000 Reichskassenscheine,’ said the mountain. ‘Ear-rings to match – that was another 50,000. And a ring, the stone set in platinum. Another 30,000.’

  ‘That sous-directeur is just inflating the loss for insurance purposes,’ grumbled St-Cyr.

  No sausage was offered, not even the sauerkraut.

  ‘He wishes he was,’ said Rudi, watching them both as one would two frogs before spearing them for their legs. ‘But apparently a woman had been in on several occasions to try on the sapphires. Tall, blonde, statuesque and with eyes not unlike your little Giselle’s, my Hermann. That perfect shade of violet. A chanteuse who couldn’t quite make up her mind.’

  ‘Ah no, not Gabrielle …?’ blurted St-Cyr, aghast at the implications.

  A bit of sausage was cut off and savoured, Rudi judging the smoke-curing to have been as perfect as the times and the constant demand for sausage had allowed. ‘The same,’ he said. ‘Maybe she has some explaining to do, maybe she hasn’t. Like I said, it’s a small world.’

  Louis leapt from his chair to grab his coat and hat and then to head for the street and the car. Rudi nailed Kohler’s wrist to the table with a grip of iron. ‘The fence or fences, Hermann. The loot, mein lieber Detektiv. I want a part of it.’

  ‘For the future?’

  ‘Who knows what might happen but it’s wisest, I think, to be prepared for all eventualities, is it not?’

  ‘Leningrad is only a city. It means nothing.’

  ‘Nor, then, does Stalingrad or the machine-gun nests the Wehrmacht are installing around town.’

  ‘Still no snipers on the roof?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Rudi had wanted the snipers up there in case the citizens of Paris should take a notion to revolt.

  ‘Information, my Hermann.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘Gut. Oh, I almost forgot. A cigar, ja? for the proud papa to be. Take care of your little Liebling. I hope it’s a son to replace one of those you lost. Twin boys, perhaps, who knows? But watch over her. Don’t let them pick her up just because you weren’t cooperating. Your visitor is straight from Berlin and doesn’t trust either of you. He smells a rat. Don’t disappoint him. Give him one.’

  ‘Louis …? Do you mean Louis?’

  Kohler threw a tortured look towards the street. The cigar was crumbled in a fist and fell to the floor, a waste.

  Rudi patted him on the shoulder. ‘But first the Gypsy, mein Schatz,* and his woman, his Tshaya.’

  * the Black Maria

  * my treasure.

  3

  The rue de la Paix was an unexpected sea of traffic. The snow came steadily. A misery for the drivers, the weather was a joy to the passengers who laughed, stood up precariously in their hacked-off bathtub seats, settees, and ancient fauteuils to throw snowballs at one another. The girls wore thin overcoats, wavy hair and pillbox hats with nets of veiling or snap-brim fedoras and upturned collars, the boys were in grey-green, blue or black uniforms. There was no language barrier, not today.

  A circus. Cartier’s wore a banner: Fermé pour les altérations.

  Every newspaper had seized on the robberies and had raised the hue and cry with: HEISTS IN THE MILLIONS, WHAT WILL BE NEXT?

  First one enterprising vélo-taxi driver and then another had conceived the brilliant idea of a Robbery Tour. And since no two of those crazy rickshawlike contraptions were the same, colours, shapes and sizes clashed as the din rose to attic garrets five and six storeys above the fashionable shops.

  Angered, dismayed – terrified, yes, damn it! by what Rudi Sturmbacher had just said, Kohler threw up his big hands in despair and said, ‘Merde! Let’s leave this bucket of bolts in the middle of the street.’

  This beautiful Citroën … ‘They’ll only scratch the paint. They’re already doing so.’

  Kohler got out to hold up his badge and part the waves. An onslaught of snowballs drove him back behind the wheel.

  ‘I could have told you so,’ grumbled the Sûreté and, looking well along the street, nodded towards place Vendôme. ‘They pulled it down. The city’s like that, Hermann. Once the people get the fever of an idea nothing can stop them. That’s Paris.’

  ‘Pulled what down?’ They’d work to do and Louis was in a huff and sensing trouble. ‘Make it short, mein Kamerad. Don’t give me any of your fucking Quatsch.* Not today.’

  Hermann’s conscience was troubling him. ‘The column, idiot. After our defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the citizens got to hating what it represented – all those deaths and failures in Napoleon’s Russian Campaign. They set up a government here in opposition to that of Versailles and one of the first things they did was to pull that thing down.’

  ‘They didn’t? Hell, the damned thing’s the height of a blastfurnace stack. It must weigh tonnes.’

  ‘It does. Thousands watched as it broke into three pieces before hitting the ground, and then into at least thirty. There were clouds of dust.’

  ‘Yet it was put back.’

  Louis gave the Gallic shrug Kohler knew he would. ‘They were bound to, but that’s another matter. What’s important for you people to grasp, Hermann, is that they did pull it down, and in one day. 1 May 1871, a Monday at 5.40 p.m.’

  You people … ‘Rudi only asked me if I had a source for him. Some cheese.’

  How lame of Hermann. ‘And did you?’

  ‘You don’t trust me.’

  ‘I’m your partner. I have to.’

  And I’m your friend, arent’ I? – Kohler could sense this in the tone of voice. Crises they had had before but never anything like this. Giselle would be yanked from the flat or the street and thrown into a cell – beaten probably. She’d lose the kid. And Oona …? Oona would be deported and never heard of again. Shit!

  Kohler gazed well down the street over the jostling sea that all but imperceptibly flowed towards them. He saw Oona in rags, her eyes bluer still and gaunt with hunger. She’d be worrying about Giselle. ‘All right, Rudi warned me. Herr Max is after your head.’

  Twelve hundred Russian and Austrian cannons had been taken at Austerlitz in 1805 by blood, tears and sweat and hauled all the way back to Paris to be melted down and cast into the bronze sheathing of that first column. In 1875 that sheathing had been recast using moulds still kept from the time of the First Empire. ‘It’s a small world, as your countryman has only just informed us, Hermann. Moscow and Russia were Napoleon’s nemesis. Stalingrad, Leningrad and Russia will be Hitler’s.’

  ‘I’ll help you.’

  ‘But that might not help us.’

  ‘Gabrielle can’t be involved in this business, Louis.’

  ‘That’s what we must endeavour to determine.’

  Gabrielle Arcuri was Louis’s chanteuse, the new love of his life, though that affair had remained unconsummated – Kohler was certain of this, certain, too, that Louis was still missing Marianne and Philippe and blaming himself for what had happened to them.

  He had met Gabrielle not two months ago while on that nothing murder in Fontainebleau Forest. She’d been a suspect then, was she a suspect now too? Ah verdammt! lamented Kohler silently. Why did the Occupier have to be such bastards?

  Leaving the car in the centre of the street, they managed to lock the doors, then thread their way to the pavement and along to Cartier’s.

  Gabrielle was involved with the Resistance – a tiny cell, a nothing cell. They both knew it of her, knew also, as did she, that Gestapo Paris’s Listen
ers had recently bugged her dressing-room at the Club Mirage, so the matter, it was serious.

  ‘Is her group hiding the Gypsy, Hermann?’

  ‘Merde alors, I wish I knew. The idiots! Don’t they know what Gestapo Paris will do to them? Boemelburg, Louis. Boemelburg!’

  The post, the shots at dawn if still alive.

  Clément Laviolette, the sous-directeur, was distraught. ‘A tragedy,’ he lamented, on seeing them enter the shop. ‘Irreplaceable, Inspectors. Twelve cushion-shaped sapphire beads of a depth of blue and clarity I have never seen before. Never! Years … it has taken years to accumulate such stones. Each bead has a round diamond brilliant of two carats in its centre. There are thirty-two matching sapphire cabochons graded as to size and linked so as to drape from the neckline of cushions. Each cabochon is separated from the next by a pearl of such exquisiteness, they, too, have taken years to accumulate.’

  ‘There was a bracelet,’ said St-Cyr.

  ‘Ear-rings, too, and a ring. Matching stones. Ah mon Dieu, Inspectors, what are we to do? The pieces had been paid for, you understand. 8,600,000 francs up front, the receipt for which I myself have signed.’

  A tragedy, like he’d said, thought Kohler. ‘You didn’t lose the cash, too, did you?’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes.’

  ‘Yet you did not inform us of these items last night?’ exclaimed St-Cyr. ‘Surely you must have known …’

  ‘They weren’t in the vault, were they?’ bleated his partner.

  Vehemently the sous-directeur shook his head. ‘They were in my private safe. It’s in my office behind the painting. We … we did not think … Ah! the door to it was securely closed and the dial turned to the number 47 just as I myself would have left it.’

  Believing the worst, Kohler sighed, ‘So, when was the payment made, eh?’

  ‘On Saturday. There had been a few minor adjustments to make – nothing much. Mademoiselle Arcuri was really very pleased. A little something new, to go with the dress that is her trademark. We’ve been trying for some time to get just the right pieces together for her. She was ecstatic’

  I’ll bet she was, thought Kohler ruefully. Five numbers to the combination – would there have been that many for her to have memorized?