Villers-Cotterêts, which they were now entering, had its all-but enclosing forest: oaks, beech and hornbeam but still, even seventy-five kilometres or so from Paris, there was virtually no sign of the Occupier, just an emptiness that made one feel as if the end of the Occupation had finally come. Bien sûr, there would then be a bloodbath as during the Revolution, old scores being brutally settled, neighbour against neighbour, brother against brother, former corporals against former sergeants who were not even of their own unit and had just come upon them abandoning their weapons. God having a bit of fun.
That bank had failed entirely to recover its van. Hours it had taken hunting for that girl, Hermann insisting that they keep on trying until Joliot had finally said, ‘Enough. That’s it, mes amis,’ and he and the two with him had returned to Laon with the victims who would eventually be sent on to Paris.
Rocheleau had not been dismissed, but given a warning. He was not to discuss what had happened with anyone, wife or not. Father Adrien the same.
And Anna-Marie Vermeulen? ‘Paris, 20 August of last year and a pair of shoes,’ he said as if she was with him. ‘Perhaps it is that you did have some prior knowledge of l’Abbaye de Vauclair, but why a handkerchief that would positively identify you if arrested, since that must have been why you tried to hide it?’
The lower slopes of the Chemin des Dames, the forest, path, ferns and spring all came to mind, the smell of the wet, autumn leaves, that of the water too, even its taste, and the sight of that broken fern and those trampled saplings.
‘You must have willingly gone back to that truck. The poultice, having come loose and fallen, either earlier or later, was put into the firebox and then later, when that was cleared in a hurry, removed from the ashes and dropped behind that wall. But to live as a diver in Paris couldn’t have been easy. Always there are snap controls. Even walking in the Jardin du Luxemburg or sitting with a “coffee” outside a café can lead to the same. The date on that newspaper gives us only a lesser limit to the length of your stay. Weeks, even months, could have been spent in Paris before you ever acquired those shoes. And you wouldn’t have bought them on the marché noir, since the price alone would have drawn attention to you. Instead, you either found them, which seems unlikely, or were given them, and if so, by whom? A wealthy woman?
‘And since you had managed to remain free for such a time, why did you then suddenly decide to leave, only to return, and where, of course, did you actually go? Back to the Netherlands, as suggested by that handkerchief? There has to have been a very pressing reason.’
Anise might help, since the pipe or even cigarettes were simply unavailable, that need so great, it had simply refused to go away.
‘Anise de l’Abbaye de Flavigny, mademoiselle. Bonbons à la menthe. Me, I will also chew a couple for yourself, though I’m not sure at all that you would have used tobacco since women don’t have the ration cards for it, and smoking does draw attention, especially since some men resent a woman’s having cigarettes they themselves haven’t. But, please, was the one who threw the contents of those pockets into the truck’s firebox a passeur? I ask because there are such, though also a fee: 10,000 in the autumn of 1940, now 100,000 or even 200,000, the half down, the other half when safely delivered, and if so, are those three—that passeur, his firebox feeder and the killer—now continuing to take you on to Paris so as to get paid the other half, since that passeur’s reputation would be at stake if he didn’t?’
Is there such a law? she seemed to ask.
‘Though many can, unfortunately, do otherwise and even turn you in for a much higher reward, this one wouldn’t because he definitely doesn’t want it known that they were involved in the killings.’
Again he thought of that empty road ahead. Again he spoke as if to her. ‘It’s as though the Occupier has suddenly left, mademoiselle. Russia is draining so many, the border between Belgium and France is now no longer being manned and one can drive straight through from Brussels to Paris. Certainly there may be the snap controls, and on the trains and in the railway stations there is always that, but did the Occupier have photos of you? Is that why you didn’t use the trains? Even in the Netherlands there are now areas so poorly manned one can apparently cross those without too much trouble, if one has something to ride, even a bicycle, of course.’
When she didn’t seem to want to reply, he took out the handkerchief to feel its softness and embroidery. ‘Your mother would have looked very carefully at this while at that age you would, I believe, have bravely awaited the verdict. Excellent, of course, but were you an only child, and where, please, in the Netherlands did you live? Paris suggests a big city since in those, despite all the dangers, it’s still much easier to live as a diver than in a little village or town where everyone notices what everyone else is up to and they all gossip. Oh for sure, some of Paris’s streets and districts are still that way. Until last winter, Hermann’s Giselle had regarded the Seine as a moat and had never been across it to the Right Bank. To her, the whole world was completely contained in the quartiers Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Sorbonne and Jardin des Plantes, with an occasional voyage a little to the south and west. She simply didn’t know of the rest or care and had closed her mind until offered a job she couldn’t refuse. The shop Enchantement on the place Vendôme and two old friends of mine whom I haven’t seen in months and must. But Vermeulen is not a specifically Jewish name, yet those were often changed to erase the inevitable prejudice only to find that the Germans have lists and records going back at least five generations. France and Paris are suffering the same, so if you were one of those who managed to get away from the Netherlands, you would have had that extra burden, though Berlin would not have sent those two expressly for that reason, yet still you carry something that would identify you? Was it needed to identify you to that passeur or to someone else? We’ll help in any case, and I know my partner will be thinking the same.’
A diver, a Taucherin, an onderduiker? wondered Kohler. Longing for a cigarette, he felt for the mégot tin only to tell himself he would have to write down the name of each of the butts used and, of course, he’d need Louis to roll the verdammt thing.
Not one for talking alone and aloud to himself, or to the victim and such like Louis, he said, ‘Oona will want us to find out everything we can and help that girl if at all possible.’
From Rotterdam, Oona was special: gentle, beautiful, supremely intelligent and everything he would ever need in a life’s companion. Louis had been absolutely right, but having lost both her husband and children, she had, he knew, times that were very hard. A voice, a photo in a magazine or child near a school, and the tears would start and she’d have to be held. ‘And I’m not there enough. Giselle helps, that’s for sure, but Johan would be nine now, Anna seven. Would they even recognize their mother?’
Six to eight million, maybe even ten, had been on the roads during the Blitzkrieg. The Stukas had come, and then the Messerschmitts, and she and Martin had been unable to find the children and ever since then she had maintained that a mother would know, that she felt they had been buried in unmarked graves beside that road. There had been those, he and Louis had discovered, but not their names. Constantly he placed advertisements in the newspapers, like lots of others still. ‘And she always wants to know what’s been going on at home.’
Back in February 1941, in Amsterdam, there had been an altercation at an ice-cream parlor and about four hundred young Jews had been arrested, some so badly beaten, fifty had soon died in the Konzentrationslager at Buchenwald, the rest being sent on to the KZ at Mauthausen. But being Dutch and not liking what had happened, the Netherlanders had gone on strike on the twenty-fifth of that month, circumstance putting a stop to it within about three days. Even so, by September 1941 every Jew in the country had been registered. All 140,000, of whom about 20,000 had been refugees, most of whom had fled the Reich before the war. And by April of this year, none had been allowed to l
ive anywhere other than Amsterdam or in the internment camps of Vught and Westerbork, the latter being the main transit point.
‘And now?’ he asked himself, clenching a fist at the inhumanity, for it had been going on here too, and Louis and he had come up against it time and again. ‘Only about 2,000 are left in the Netherlands. That Le Matin of 20 August 1942 dates to just a month after that first major round-up in Paris. What was happening here would have driven her crazy with worry.’
Slamming on the brakes, he got out to impatiently wait for Louis.
One would have thought him a sudden control, felt St-Cyr, for Hermann was a big man and the breath was billowing from under that fedora and into the frosty darkness that was lit from behind by the faintness of the Citroën’s headlamps and then his own.
‘Louis, she went home to find out what had happened to her parents. Oona’s always wanting to for the same reason, and not just her own, but Martin’s too. That’s why that girl took such a chance with the embroidery. She brought it from home—it was all she could find. She couldn’t stand not knowing what could well have happened and had finally forced herself to leave Paris.’
‘Only to then find out and hitch a return with a passeur?’
‘Passeurs don’t drive trucks like that. They’re usually loaners. They sit a few seats behind in the bus or railway carriage, not in heavily loaded trucks that can’t even get up the speed of a gasoline engine.’
‘Unless …’
Ah merde! ‘Using the cover of hauling stuff to sell on the marché noir. I don’t think there’ve ever been any passeurs caught doing that, but …’
‘There’s always a first time, Hermann, though it still doesn’t explain Berlin’s sending those two.’
‘Then maybe there’s an FTP connection.’
As Hermann and he both knew, the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans were the backbone of actively armed resistance and the cause, no doubt, of the recent death of Dr. Julius Ritter. ‘What a happy thought.’
‘It’s a night for them. Now roll us one from these. Two Wills Goldflake and two Chesterfields.’
Though but a rumour like everything else they usually heard, von Rundstedt, commander of the army in the West, had recently sent the Führer a detailed report of the rapid increase in rail sabotage. In September alone there had been more than 500 serious actions, compared to a monthly average of 120 for the first half of the year. FTP réseaux were thought to be small, their security so tight none would even fart in public, but there would be Italians among them from the days of 1930s and Mussolini’s hatred of the Communists, Armenians, too, from the Turkish troubles, and Poles, especially from just before and after 1 September 1939.
‘And Austrians, Hermann, from before, during and right after the Anschluss. The Third Republic and Paris, in particular, offered home to many.’
‘And most would likely have taken day jobs that fitted them right in, some even having gotten married and had families.’
Name changes too, and false papers, but was that girl connected to any of them? If so, then they really did have a problem on their hands.
Near Le Bourget, the giant Paris aerodrome, the fog the rain had brought was so thick at 0347 Berlin Time, St-Cyr knew Lufthansa’s early-morning flight from Berlin through to Madrid and Lisbon would have been cancelled. That such could even exist in wartime was remarkable, but there were also once- or twice-weekly flights to Bristol by Pan-American Clipper and the Free Dutch KLM* from Sintra, which was about ninety kilometres to the west of Lisbon. ‘Not that they’re one hundred percent safe from being shot down, mademoiselle, but they do offer hope,’ he said as if again to her.
The Luftwaffe’s Luftflotte 3 squadron of bombers that had taken over the airfield in June 1940 would also have been grounded, and London and other cities and towns given a peaceful night, this district too.
‘And to think that not so very long ago I stood waiting, along with 100,000 others, including my first wife, to cheer Lindbergh as he landed the Spirit of Saint Louis at twenty-two minutes past ten in the evening, 21 June 1927. It was memorable, mademoiselle. Agnès and myself wouldn’t have missed it for all the world, but who would have thought we’d be in another tragic war by 1 September 1939?’
At the turn-off to Drancy, that transit point for Jews and Gypsies, there was only one tiny blue-washed light over the black-lettered arrow that had originally been put up by the Préfecture du Département de la Seine more than a year ago. An unfinished, U-shaped complex of low-income tenements, five of which were currently being lived in by legal citizens, the remaining unfinished four-storey had at first been run by French police but had been taken over by the SS in July of this year, though the perimeter was still guarded by Frenchmen—jobs, if nothing else. ‘Yet it’s only five kilometres (three miles) from Paris. Technically you’re an illegal, mademoiselle, and by the Vichy statute of 24 October 1940, subject to immediate arrest and internment regardless of whether you are Jewish or not. Even without the Occupier’s having requested such a thing, Vichy undertook to have everyone who had come here to evade the Nazis prior to 1 September 1939 and thereafter locked up.’
Aubervilliers was industrial, the stench of soot rank on the fog-ridden air. Ash heaps, incredibly poor housing, raw sewage and all such things marred la zone, the peripheral suburbs, and made them deplorable for far too many but … Hermann had stopped and had taken out his pistol.
‘When the end comes, Louis, it’ll start in places like this.* It’s now all but impossible for the Wehrmacht to even patrol the streets here at night. Stay close. It’s not often a bank van crawls through at 0420 hours.’
The curfew would end at 0500 hours, but because of its imposition, the farmers couldn’t do the usual and arrive at Les Halles in the early hours, and the belly of Paris had become a mere shadow of its former self.
Given the lack of traffic, the control on the Porte d’Aubervilliers had far too many heavily armed men. Again Hermann had to pause, and when he came back, he was clearly unsettled. ‘It can’t be for us, Louis. It has to be for that passseur’s gazogène. Kriminalrat Ludin’s been waiting for hours to have a word. Oona’s with him in the car and desperate. Stay up front in the van and use the lockdown so that no matter how hard the boys here try, they won’t get in.’
Acorn water lay between them on the linoleum-topped table. Nicotine-stained, Ludin’s thick fingers lit yet another, a Juno from home this time, that gaze of his behind those steel-rimmed specs unfeeling.
‘Kohler, must I remind you that a few answers are necessary?’
This eingefleischter Nazi was even wearing the Goldenes Parteiabzeichen, given especially to the very early members. ‘Maybe first, Kriminalrat, you’d tell me what you think you were doing by terrifying Oona and bringing her here or anywhere else at any hour?’
Trust Kohler to think of the well-being of such.
‘Ach, when I called round to the flat and found she didn’t know where you were, I thought to ease her mind both by telling her you’d be arriving soon—my mistake, of course—and that I would be only too glad of a little company en route. Unfortunately we soon had to follow a convoy on its way out to Drancy. A child, wanting to feel the air, kept parting the rear truck’s canvas tarpaulin and shoving an arm out, which upset her greatly, and for this I apologize profusely, but that fog … Liebe Zeit, I even had to rip the blinkers off my headlamps. Is it always so thick in Paris?’
‘Usually it rises from the Seine to smother everything, but this one is different.’
Like himself, was that it? Matches were as if of gold and when Kohler set the box aside and didn’t return it, the thought was to see if he would really attempt to steal it. ‘Tobacco and that first drag, eh? Already things begin to look a little better, so let’s make a bit of peace between us. What did you find in such a godforsaken place?’
The rumpled, grey prewar suit with the egg-stained tie and ha
ndkerchief that definitely needed laundering had obviously seen everything far too many times, but still he’d have to try. ‘Maybe first you’d tell me what you and that colonel were looking for, and while you’re at it, give me his name. He does have one, doesn’t he, or did his parents deliberately forget?’
Insubordination was one thing, and Kohler was certainly noted for it, ridicule something else. ‘Please don’t continue to be difficult. Just give me whatever evidence you managed to find.’
‘Two bodies, both with a nine-millimetre Parabellum, the gun perhaps a Walther P38 or Luger and probably sold on the schwarzer Markt by one of our own. It happens all the time now, Kriminalrat. The Führer ought to pay our boys a little more.’
‘And you’ve concluded the killer was French, have you?’
‘Was he?’
Verdammt, did Kohler suspect otherwise? ‘Money was taken, was it?’
‘Plenty, but until we get that bank to go over everything, we won’t know the exact amount.’
To this, the grizzled fleshy cheeks and sagging jowls were favoured before sucking on that cigarette until only the smallest of butts remained.
‘And this cash, Kohler, was it carried away on a bicycle or in a farmer’s cart?’
‘Instead of a truck? Is that why this crowd of imbeciles in uniform is hanging around looking as if waiting for one?’
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