Kohler was never going to learn. ‘All right, there was a truck, one of those that uses a firebox and the resulting charcoal or wood gas. It depends. They don’t usually burn both together unless desperate since it can cause problems.’
‘And you’ve been chasing it?’
But from where and for how long—was this what Kohler wanted? The Netherlands perhaps? ‘Looking for it would be better.’
‘Why? Because they’ve robbed someone else?’
Again Ludin found his cigarettes and lit another, but would this irritating pest swallow what would have to be said in order to get him to cough up the necessary yet keep him from the truth? ‘Human trafficking, Kohler. The Reichssicherheitshauptamt are concerned and want it stopped.’
The SD’s Security Office. Ernst Kaltenbrunner was head of it, a drunkard and a sadist, but sending one Standartenführer and an aging Gestapo after a single passeur didn’t make sense. ‘Have you and that colonel got similar reception committees stationed at every entrance to the city?’
The Höherer SS und Polizeiführer of France, Karl Oberg and his deputy, Helmut Knochen, had warned them of Kohler’s penchant for honesty bordering on intransigence, but an answer would have to be given with the curtest of nods.
It was, felt Kohler, hard to believe that Berlin’s SD knew so little of how things worked in Paris they would unwittingly broadcast their interest in such a way. ‘And who was this still unnamed Schmuggler trafficking?’
Had Kohler and St-Cyr found evidence of that girl? ‘That I can’t reveal, but was there any evidence of someone other than the killer?’
Finally the chips were down, and with Oona waiting in the Citroën. ‘None. Far too much rain. No tracks, not even a whisper of that gazo truck you’ve been chasing.’
‘Did I not say, “looking for?” Ach, mein Strudel at last. Are you sure you wouldn’t like half of this? Illegal for most others in France, of course, but my Hilda was a remarkable cook. Every morning, six days a week, and even seven far too many times, there would be a little extra in the briefcase for lunch. A slice of her marvellous strudel, Kohler—I’m partial to the apple-and-raisin. Though the latter are so difficult to find these days, she still managed somehow. A few of her Lebkuchen …’
The cakes of life. ‘Meine Oma used to make them.’
His grandmother! ‘Spicy, Kohler, as life should be now and then, yet sweet as it always was before I was forced to identify the Bombenbrandschrumpfleischen.’
The heat-shrunken corpses the firestorm had left, but must that God of Louis’s keep smiling at the partnership?
‘The wife, Kohler, our eighteen-year-old house-daughter, Inge, too, and my Hilda’s parents and their four dogs, the ones I always hated because they’d piss on my shoes and trousers if they could. Now I will have answers from you, mein lieber Kamerad, or that Netherlander out there in my car will end up exactly like them.’
And to think that 40,000 of these in the Reich could control a nation of 80 million at home largely through voluntary denunciations. ‘Let me talk to my partner. Let us take that van to the bank and settle a few things. We can’t interrupt a murder inquiry just to fuck about with something Berlin’s SD might or might not even know, and if you question it, mein Freund, think of all the shouting that must be going on about the Résistance getting the better of us. Von Rundstedt, eh, and the Kommandant von Gross-Paris, to say nothing of the avenue Foch and Oberg and his deputy.’
‘Then take the woman with you. Maybe she’ll be reminder enough.’
Oona was silent. She didn’t even respond when held in the partnership’s Citroën. Instead, she pulled away from him, felt Kohler, and through the darkness between and around them said, ‘First he told me that should I ever find my children, I must remember that they were half-and-halves, Mischlinge, crossbreeds, and that their fate would soon be decided, that Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian SS who runs my country, is determined to include them, as is Darquier de Pellepoix, Vichy’s commissioner for Jewish affairs, but that Herr Kaltenbrunner and others in Berlin are still mulling the question over. But with myself, because of whom I had married, there would be no such problem. All of my hair would be shaved off and I would be deloused, and if fit for work, would be made to, if not, the furnace. Is that what those people would have done to my Martin, Hermann, and my Johan and Anna?’
The truth about the Konzentrationslager was never mentioned openly by any of the Occupier but had become very clear to Louis and himself at Natzweiler-Struthof in Alsace last February, but for Ludin to have said anything like that could only mean he and that colonel were desperate. And that could only mean that Kaltenbrunner had ordered them to find the truck, the killer and that girl and settle whatever it was, or else.
‘And Giselle?’ he asked, for he had to, and Oona would understand.
‘The same.’
Again Hermann tried to hold her but having lain with him, having come to love and accept, and to befriend his Giselle like a sister, had she not done the most hateful of things, no matter his having put himself at terrible risk to rescue and look after her?
Pushing him away a second time, she said emptily, ‘When he went to pull the blackout tape from the headlamps and talk to the men in those trucks, he used the pinch-the-cat* he had kept in a trouser pocket, but when he returned, he didn’t put it back. He just tossed it onto the seat between us, and I heard it hit the little bottle he’d been using and then the tin of cigarettes, and every time those trucks made a turn, we did too, and it would roll toward me, only to roll away.’
‘What little bottle?’
‘Bitters for the stomach to help the digestion. Jägermeister.’
‘And?’
‘Beneath it and the tin of fifty Lucky Strike, was a large flat envelope. Brown, as it turned out, and of stiff paper. Manila, I think, though it must now be so rare, few would ever get to use it.’
‘Sealed?’
Was Hermann beginning to understand? ‘Red wax impressed with a swastika signet, the writing in black Gothic lettering, the seals broken.’
‘Geheime Reichssache?’
Secret Reich business, but did this man whom she had come to love now understand how she must have felt and still did, that Kriminalrat Ludin, knowing she would look when he was away from the car, had silently dared her to? ‘Me, I was alone, for he had gone to meet you in that café, but had he really? Wouldn’t he wait to see what I did? Prisoner to him, I hung on for as long as I could.’
‘And?’
What a brief and final word that was, but Herr Ludin must have wanted her to tell him. ‘It had been sent from the Hague.’
‘The SD’s Central Archive for the Netherlands.’
‘Is that not my country, Herr Kohler?’
‘Oona, I’m your Hermann. Please just tell me.’
‘Maybe I don’t understand you anymore or myself. His following those trucks full of the deported to Drancy really upset me and he knew it. Two twenty-by-twenty prints of the same girl, the sliver of light I let escape reminding me of how I once looked at that age. Full of hope and joy, Hermann. She wasn’t any more than twenty or twenty-one, the hair like mine. Very fine and fair and braided into a short rope for convenience, the other photo showing her with a page-boy cut dyed jet-black to hide her identity from those who would then have snapped her photo anyway.’
‘Taken when?’
‘When do you think?’
‘Oona, please.’
‘Will you marry me like you’ve said often enough?’
‘Yes, and as soon as possible.’
Which, of course, would mean never. How could it be otherwise? ‘Imagine then, me drawing those photos out of that envelope knowing that at any minute he might return from speaking to you. 25 February 1941.’
And stamped on the back. ‘The general strike and snapped by …’
‘An NSB* probably. That’s all I r
eally know.’
But working hand and glove with the Occupier, just as did the home-grown fascists in France. ‘Did you get a look at the sheets the Hague would have sent?’
How anxious he was, all else now set aside, even such thoughts for the future. ‘There were sheets and sheets of that grey office paper the war has given. Carbon copies so thin, I was terrified they would bunch up and betray me.’
And badly faded because when used over and over again, the carbon paper would also have been reversed, the bottom fed into the typewriter first, as per Goebbels, the Reichsminister of propaganda and public enlightenment. ‘Six copies made and only one of them needed.’
‘Who is she, this Anna-Marie Vermeulen who bears the first name of my daughter and is a Mischlinge as well? Eine Halbjüdin just like my own?’
‘We don’t know anything about her. This is all news.’
‘Is it? Is it, really? Or are you lying to the woman you’ve just said you’ll marry?’
‘All right, I was only trying to protect you. She left a bit of embroidery with her name on it.’
‘How very like myself at the age of ten. My Anna was looking forward to learning.’
‘Was there anything else?’
‘When I pulled the photos out, it fell to the floor, a piece of metal.’
Oona would have been desperate to recover it. Reaching for her, he heard her saying, ‘Don’t! I might scream because of what I’ve been allowing myself to do with you. I want to be certain.’
‘You know that’s not necessary.’
‘It might be.’
‘What was it then?’
‘A rijksdaaler. Silver and minted early in 1940 and the last of those. Everything must now be of paper or zinc, and thin at that.’
A two-and-a-half guilder coin.
‘When I carefully put it back into that envelope, I felt two others and these have made me ask if they were sent from the Hague or had that Gestapo found them somewhere? One is interesting. Three’s a lot, especially when one of them was wrapped tightly in a small piece of white paper and still had earth on it, mud I couldn’t replace because it had dried, Hermann.’
And Ludin had wanted her to have a look.
Though it would still be dark for ages, felt St-Cyr, the curfew had lifted and traffic had begun to enter the city but not yet themselves for they still had the van to deal with. Mostly there were the bicycles of those going to work, but all were subjected to a rigid checking of the papers, et cetera, and beside every Feldwebel was his interpreter, and always there were the Vichy food controllers, the flics and black-market cops ready to pounce.
Emotionally and physically exhausted, Oona had instantly fallen asleep behind them in the back seat of the Citroën, with Hermann’s coat over her. Hunger had had to be set aside, thirst too, and the need for tobacco. ‘Photos, Hermann. Typed sheets from Hague Central.’
They would have to keep their voices down. ‘Oona only managed to read that Anna-Marie was a half-and-half, but obviously Ludin and that SD are after her.’
‘A Sonderkommando?’
One of the specials. ‘And that still doesn’t make much sense, does it, but Ludin threatened Oona with the furnaces, Louis, and that has to definitely mean they’re really under the gun. Bien sûr, Kaltenbrunner is fond of dispatching such and ordering them not to tell anyone anything. Even Oberg probably doesn’t know why the hell they’re in the city.’
So great was the fear of reprisals, even having SD Head Office papers or a letter from the same negated anyone asking anything. ‘Yet Herr Ludin gives Oona a chance to look.’
‘Since he’s been ordered not to tell us the necessary, he technically hasn’t and won’t be blamed—Oona will—but obviously he feels we need a little help, if we’re to make life easier for himself and that SD.’
‘A Netherlander, Hermann. A protest marcher who dyes the hair and changes its style only to unsuccessfully hide her identity.’
‘Well, at least we now know why she didn’t use the trains on her way back to Paris.’
‘Do we really?’
‘Ah merde, don’t be difficult at a time like this. Instead of those, it’s a passeur at heavy cost, a firebox feeder with an antique mégot tin, and a killer who empties his victims’ pockets only to have that passeur—and it must have been him—toss everything into the fire.’
Hermann always liked to hurry. ‘Shouldn’t we ask ourselves first, did someone warn her of the photos and even pay for the trip? After all, this is a girl who can’t have had a lot of money.’
‘Agreed.’
‘Now let’s deal with that passeur, the firebox feeder and the other one, but before he became the killer.’
‘Mein Gott, must you?’
‘I’m waiting. I need your help.’
‘She would have been hidden in the back of that truck, would probably never have been allowed up front, but came to feel that something was terribly wrong, and when she saw a chance, left that gazo to walk ahead alongside the road to that van where she cajoled a lift. She’s again a blonde, has blue eyes, was young, et cetera et cetera, so she took those shoes out of her suitcase and put them on to add further spice and give a bit of extra height.’
‘Ah bon, merci, you’ve got all the answers, but wasn’t she wearing a poultice, probably on the hand or forearm? Also, mon vieux, since when have we ever seen any woman in high heels walking alongside any of our roads for very far? France really doesn’t have as many of the paved Autobahnen as the Organisation Todt built for the Reich in the 1930s and are still building.’
‘That van and truck were relatively close. They’d have to have been.’
‘Bon, now let’s ask why they were close, and more importantly, Hermann, why had they stopped, since they must have.’
‘A control.’
‘Which would, I think, have worried both vehicles.’
‘A long line-up, but not yet at any entrance to the city. Simply on one of the main access roads. Maybe the RD 380 to the east of Reims.’
‘Perfect. Except for isolated lookouts and fortresses, it runs through dead-flat farmland, but what would have made her do such a desperate thing since she or someone else must have paid plenty to get her into Paris?’
‘Oona said that one of those three rijksdaalers had earth on it and was wrapped in a bit of paper.’
‘A note, Hermann?’
‘Probably, but Oona was so terrified she’d be found out, she didn’t try to read it.’
‘But were those coins being left as a signal to Herr Ludin by someone with the passeur, someone that one and his firebox feeder didn’t know everything about? Places that the killer and Ludin would have known of beforehand, and that Standartenführer also?’
‘Since they’d been following because that killer would have told them of the route, and like crumbs in a fairy tale, had attached a note to one of the coins, telling them that she could well be onto him. Ein Spitzel, Louis?’
An informant. ‘But one of those coins wouldn’t have been left at l’Abbaye de Vauclair since that stop would not have been on the schedule.’
‘And Ludin didn’t even bother to get out of the tourer to have a look.’
‘A traitor, Hermann, though maybe not a prisoner of war from the Dutch Army, but are we still missing something? Has it been too easy so far? Two vehicles, both heavily loaded with goods in part at least for the marché noir, the passeur using that as cover, the other simply to line the pockets or those of someone else.’
‘And is that not why the killer did what he did?’
Good for Hermann. ‘Because they couldn’t be left alive, could they, but did that passeur agree beforehand and order the killings or come to accept the haste with which they were done but only afterward?’
Ach, mein Gott, trust Louis! ‘The killer thus proving how reliable and loyal he was, but th
at girl would never have accepted it, would she, and must have kept quiet for fear he would kill her too.’
‘And if so, Hermann, is now even more terrified.’
‘They then staged the robbery to make it all look like that but failed because they took only what could never be used to identify them. And as for that gazo of theirs, they don’t need to use this entrance to Paris and probably won’t. They’ll simply wait and let things cool down, then use one where they know there are those who will let them in for a price because they’ve done that lots of times. They must have.’
‘And that, Hermann, is why I think Herr Ludin took it upon himself to break Herr Kaltenbrunner’s strict order of silence. He and that SD colonel really are desperately in need of help, though the latter of them might not have sanctioned what the former wanted Oona to see.’
‘Along with the constant cigarettes and repeated swigs of bitters.’
‘Me, I just wish I felt more confident and that we weren’t missing something vital.’
To the rue de Crimée in the 19th, in La Villette at 0532 hours, came the awakening of Paris as it dragged itself through the icy fog and darkness. So numerous were the streams of bicycles, their lamps were as fireflies. Ever-present were the shouts, curses, cries of alarm and urgent ringing of bells, some so close St-Cyr knew he could open the side window of the van, as he had to clear the rearview again, and touch a cyclist.
Pungently ersatz perfume, unwashed bodies and tobacco smoke, this last of dried leaves, herbs and the roasted carrot tops of desperation, rushed in on the air. The traffic was insane. With occasional trucks and far fewer city buses, there were well over 1.5 million bicycles and bicycle taxis in the city, to say nothing of the countless pedestrians who tended to ignore all rules since there were so few cars.
Finding Anna-Marie Vermeulen’s Opinel in his coat pocket wasn’t difficult. Opening it, he laid it on the seat. Unless he was very wrong, Ludin must have felt that the sooner she was arrested, the better, and that must be why, in spite of there being so few private cars, two of them were following the Citroën. He had better have a word.
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