Two men had died, they not having used it, thought Hartmann. ‘We always get vans from that bank coming through. How much cash was taken?’
The things one learned. ‘Lots, but they were also hauling things for the schwarzer Markt.’
‘And people, too, like the other vans from that same bank?’
Ach, how lovely. ‘Maybe. That’s something else I wanted to ask your Oberfeldwebel.’
‘This is good,’ said Hartmann of the pear brandy.
‘Then have some more and another of these. My partner won’t mind. He’s French and he does what I tell him because he has to, but he’s cut himself rather badly. If you could lose that first-aid kit on your belt, would one of these five-thousand notes help you to get another?’
A five-thousand note, when two hundred was more than enough!
Listening to the sounds, distant now from the escort service and dance studios, St-Cyr paused in this last of corridors. He was, he knew, well above the avenue Beaucour, which, with its cul-de-sac, bordered the Salle Pleyel on the east. There were no immediate neighbours, no elevator next to the room, just a nearby back staircase that would have offered another route down to street level if needed. But beyond the room, there was something else: a short flight of stairs that would have taken her to the roofs. As a diver, she would have kept both in mind, for the roofs here would continue well along the avenue Beaucour.
Finding the Sûreté’s pass keys the early 1930s had given him as a chief inspector, he began to try them, conscious always that Concierge Figeard might indeed have thought to check, and when the lock gave, whispered, ‘Dieu merci,’ and softly let himself in, closing, and locking it behind himself.
A maid’s garret, une chambre de bonne, the room was so bare he had to wonder at her having lived here since that third week of August 1941. Seemingly alone on the makeshift 1920s counter of the opposite wall, the washbasin was but one of those badly chipped enamel flea-market things. So small was the cube of the grey national, one could fail to notice it. Slaked lime, sand and ground horse chestnuts, it was not only gritty but likely to burn and leave a rash. But a wash every day, no matter how cold the room.
There was no heat, of course. Well to his left, tidily against the wall and in a corner, was a single-burner electric hotplate, the frayed cord well-taped. Half a box of Viandox cubes* was with two tins of sardines and one of peas. A chipped porcelain pitcher served as water carrier and source. Plate, cup and saucer, bowl, spoon, fork and knife were with a small aluminium pot and a cast-iron frying pan.
The walls were neither white nor pale grey and absolutely blank. The armoire, one rescued no doubt from the cellars, revealed equally little: two skirts, three summer dresses, a few blouses, and a light sweater. Separated from these, the dress she had been given was of a very fine and soft, dark-blue wool that matched the shoes he still had in his coat pockets. White Chantilly lace fringed the accompanying slip, brassiere and underpants and must have come from just such a shop. Enchantement? he had to ask. Would Chantal and Muriel have seen to Madame Nicole Bordeaux’s order? Not personally, of course. One of their girls would have, though they would have gone over everything carefully, but why, of course, the very expensive and equally rare lingerie?
‘I’ll have to ask them and that, mademoiselle, is bound to take us even deeper, so maybe I had better not ask.’
The silk stockings, those rarest of things, had been very carefully smoothed and were on yet another hanger, the garter belt with them. Three plain pairs of repeatedly and beautifully mended step-ins, another blouse and sweater were in a drawer with two pairs of worn-out tennis shoes, and another of walking shoes whose heels would definitely have to be replaced when money allowed. ‘But for a girl who has gone home once before, mademoiselle, there is as yet no evidence of that earlier trip. Such a spartan behaviour demands answers in itself.’
When he opened the small cardboard suitcase that was under the military cot from the Great War, he realized what she had done, for here there were three berets, one black, another crimson, the third a medium brown, also two very colourful shopping bags, both reversible but instantly giving the drab and functional. A selection of scarves that could be quickly switched was evident, also another dress, a pair of woollen slacks, shirt-blouse, warm sweater, even a spare toothbrush, step-ins, brassiere, flannelette pajamas, face cloth, towel and sanitary pads. She had put all that she would absolutely need here so that if driven to, she could quickly leave with the suitcase, and that, of course, had to mean that she would have laid out at least two routes of escape across those roofs. She had even chosen one of the Occupation’s suitcases so that if necessary she could leave it tucked in with others at a railway or bus terminal checkpoint and simply walk through with papers only. Even her jacket was reversible, and from the look of it and by hand-spanning both waist and slack-length, came the estimates: Height: 173 centimetres, weight: 50 kilos, though some of that would definitely have been lost due to the constant shortages.
‘Hair, a very light blonde, mademoiselle, but you should be more careful, since these days someone other than myself might take interest.’
Carefully coiling the strand, he tucked it away in his wallet. There were no snapshots, no mementos from home, no bottle even of black hair dye. ‘No past, no future, just the present, eh?’ he demanded, and returning the suitcase, looked carefully under the bed and found a little something else. But why hide it unless when helping with the rabbits and such, she had been forced to return the original every time and would need her own, especially if to escape?
She had had it made, and that could only have meant a block of wax, an impression, and a little help from someone else. ‘But now, of course, you have forced me to use and return it, but first I must have a further look here.’
Tidily arranged on the small table she used as a desk were her notes. It was indeed a dissertation on the Benedictines and their place in the medieval history of France, with an emphasis on the Cistercians. Everything had been carefully referenced. She must have been working on a history degree. Only frequent visits to the reading room of the Bibliothèque Nationale could have produced this. Diagrams gave the layouts of abbey after abbey, among them l’Abbaye de Vauclair but also l’Abbaye d’Orval to the east of the Ardennes, in the heart of the Gaume forest and all but on the frontier between Belgium and France. Torched in 1637, that one had been rebuilt in 1680, she had noted. Demolished in 1793, sold off as a quarry in 1797, it had been, again she had noted, rebuilt in 1926 and finally reopened in 1938 only to find itself all but in the path of the Blitzkrieg.
Down through the centuries, travellers have always been offered three days refuge, food, water and shelter.
Ah merde, she could well have told that passeur of hers where they could stop over en route to France, but had that poultice come from there? Had a herbalist monk attended to her and given warnings of septicaemia?
She had definitely known of the spring at l’Abbaye de Vauclair. A diagram, neat and perfect, even with the distances noted, gave its location, along with the notation ‘L’eau potable.’
She hadn’t just been studying for the sake of a licence. She had been plotting the use of these abbeys as way-stops en route to and from France. ‘Pilgrims, was it, mademoiselle? Is that why you found yourself in that van at those ruins? Did you also tell those two of it when you bummed a lift? And what of the others, please? Did they, too, know of it and is that why they then followed? Are we even wrong to have assumed that you bummed a lift? Is there another reason for your walking ahead to that van? Did your passeur know of those two and tell you to leave the truck while you had a chance? Merde, but you engender questions!’
At the last of her notes there was a line that she must have written just before leaving. Though from the Rule of Saint Benedict, she hadn’t quoted directly but had done as Benedict himself, and had gone right back to the primary source, the first epistle to Saint Paul, 1
Corinthians 15:10: ‘But by the grace of God I am what I am.’*
Leaving everything but the key exactly as he had found it, he gave the room a final once-over, noticing only that he had missed the cork from a bottle of Moët et Chandon. It was on the little bedside table and behind the glass she had emptied, rinsed out, dried and left upside down until her return.
Up on the roof, the wind was from the east, the air so clear he paused to draw in a few deep breaths. To the forest of chimney pots he now faced, there was not a single trail of smoke. Beyond the entrance to the stairwell was an apron of flat roof that allowed for rabbit and chicken hutches and rows of bell jars and pots of earth. Leeks, celery, Belgian endive, chicory, lettuces, green onions, chives, basil, too, and marjoram, rosemary, thyme and sage, she had them all. Sampling a few, he fed the rabbits a little, they eagerly expecting more.
‘Two visits home,’ he asked, ‘and all you bring back is a piece of embroidery? The house of your parents, mademoiselle—the home you grew up in and would have come to love. Surely you must have brought something from that first visit. Additionally, you would have hidden it where easily retrievable.’
Wedged by two slats, and up under the roof of the last of the chickens, was a tin box, some twenty-four by twenty and eight centimetres in depth, the irony total. ‘“Chabert et Guillot,” mademoiselle? When I was but a boy of four and behaving myself for a change, Grand-mère decided a reward was necessary. “They make the finest nougat in the whole wide world,” she told me. “Even Napoleon had a passion for it. Lavender honey and grape sugar, and no others but those are first heated. Egg whites are then beaten and stirred in until the consistency is such that you can dip a finger and draw out nothing but the most perfect of trails. Only then are the pistachios, almonds and dried fruit added, the whole beaten until ready to be smoothed out on special paper and cut into squares and cubes.”
‘Until the age of ten it, too, was my passion, but on 3 December 1900, my birthday, I received a tin just such as this and was of course, overwhelmed and warned not to chew too many at a time. Yanking a filling, no fault I assure you of the quality of the nougat and its perfect softness, I lost my passion and found another: the fierce and unbridled terror of dentists that I still harbour, especially since these days, no anaesthetics are available.’
Tucked out of sight behind the rabbits, he opened the box and immediately said, ‘Ah merde, you poor unfortunate.’
It wasn’t a treasure trove, not that he could see. It was, instead, one of utter despair, for the house must have been ransacked, the parents arrested and deported, the neighbours or the Occupier or both having helped themselves, even to smashing up the furniture for badly needed firewood. ‘Exactly the same is happening here,’ he said. ‘Much to our shame, necessity negates decency.’
Trampled, stained and crumpled snapshots gave views of the mother and father. In one, probably taken just after the general strike, the mother, aged forty perhaps, was pensively looking out a window. Tall, willowy and obviously very fair, her lips were tightly drawn at a future she did not want to contemplate, her left hand twisting the pearls about her neck.
Scattered, there were about six of those that Anna-Marie must have gathered.
Another snapshot was of herself at the age of ten at one of the Sunday afternoon antiques fairs in the Nieumarkt, for the Waag, that lovely many-towered building that had been built in 1488 as the southern gateway to Amsterdam, was behind her. She had a teacup she had just found to surprise her mother, the shadow of the father falling just to her right. In yet another, but at the age of twelve, she was with the brand-new Sparta her birthday must have brought. Anticipation of that newfound freedom, love, too, for her parents and that father in particular, simply emanated from her, the bike, though, one that she could never have forced herself to leave behind. Yet another snapshot showed her at the age of nineteen or twenty with the young man who must have become her fiancé, for there was an open bottle of champagne in the dune sand behind the couple.
‘Hand in hand, mademoiselle. Those are, I believe, the dunes at Zandvoort on the Noordsee. It’s only about thirty-five kilometres from Amsterdam and a favourite resort to which I once took my Agnès, but you and that boy would not have stayed over. You wouldn’t have wanted to disappoint your parents, not you.’
The crystal stopper of a perfume phial had been recovered, a wooden kitchen spoon and several loose-leaf, handwritten pages from the mother’s recipe book. ‘“Stroop pannekoek, pancakes with syrup; gember pannekoek, those with ginger, and speculaas, especially janhagel, the spiced almond cookies.”’
She had even managed to find one of the wooden moulds she would have helped to fill at a very early age, that of Saint Nicholas.
Again he took up the photo of her and that boy but this time found the cork he had taken from the shattered neck of that bottle in the van. ‘A Moët et Chandon as well, Mademoiselle Annette-Mélanie Veroche, lest I forget the name you’re now using, but a bottle that matches exactly the one in this photo and the cork you kept beside your bed so that, instead of one of these photos, you could touch it every night before sleep. Did our killer know that you were engaged? Did he mock you and take that drink when you had finally returned to that passseur’s truck? An informant, mademoiselle?’
Below these there was a gold pocket watch, its chain with a cat’s-eye fob. Obviously the father had had a hiding place she had known of. In Dutch, the inscription read, To Jonas Vermeulen for 25 years of steadfast loyalty and exemplary service, Diamant Meyerhof, Amsterdam 7 June 1932.
Even at the height of the Great Depression, the firm had done this.
Beneath everything were two flattened white cotton bags with ties. Feeling their contents brought only despair, for in the one, all the particles were essentially of the same shape and size until at last, he having opened it, he heard himself saying, ‘Congo cubes, mademoiselle? Who else knows of these and if so, why on earth are they still here?’
Brown, dark grey, clear or yellowish, and even an off-green, all were typically dimpled completely on each surface and cubic in shape, and were of from one to two millimetres to a side. ‘Boart, is collectively diamond that when crushed and ground, and separated as to size by settling in oils of differing specific gravity, yields the gradations of grinding powders modern industry simply can’t do without. Mining for these cubes really only began in earnest in 1939, but by 10 May 1940 and the Blitzkrieg, the Congo was supplying the world with nearly seventy percent of the boart and other industrials needed, those for metal-cutting, wire-drawing, trimming, shaping glass, drilling, too, and cutting slabs of rock, but you’ve a terrible problem on your hands, haven’t you? You’ve a fortune in these alone if sold on the marché noir, but can’t have told a soul, not if planning to get that boy to you via those abbeys.’
Only then did he hesitantly open the other sack, carefully setting its tie aside and spilling a little into a hand.
Clear white to off-white, and among them the exceedingly rare coloured diamonds, there were stones of every description and size up to and including those of two carats. ‘Mine and river rough,’ he managed, still stricken. Many of the crystals were octahedral, others dodecahedral, cubic, modified cubes and even hexoctahedral, but there were still others of a flattened triangular shape that, with their natural facets and colour, looked ready for setting in jewellery but could well have been used as industrials too.
As with all of them, sunlight flashed, giving myriad telltale glints. However, from himself there was only despair. Oona, Giselle, Gabi and her son were all at risk, but how had this girl come by them, only to then make a repeat journey, and what, please, had she intended?
‘Un mouchard, mademoiselle. One your passeur and his firebox feeder didn’t know about but you finally did, causing him to leave his operatives a note wrapped around a rijksdaaler? Since they didn’t stop that truck from leaving Amsterdam, there has to be something that Sonderkommand
o desperately need you to do and that can only mean Hermann and myself are being dragged deeper and deeper into it.’
Through the silence of the abattoir came the constant dripping of those verdammte taps and the muffled coughing of that boy. Too many smokes and a complete loss of nerves had put Hartmann right on edge, the stench here rank enough to permeate the skin. It was now 16.32 and Dillmann hadn’t arrived. To stay any longer was crazy. Louis would have said, Hermann, get the hell out of there while you can. Dillmann can’t be trusted anyway. If Heinrich Ludin has his hands on him, he’ll readily sing whatever tune is necessary.
Flinging the empty cigarette package away, his second, Kohler found the boy sitting on those boxes of fags into which he’d been dipping. ‘Give me one of those and don’t argue. Light it first.’
‘They’ve all been arrested. It’s Russia for sure. My mother warned me. She said they’d do that to me if I ever got in trouble. Ach, Scheisse, I would drop your cigarette. Why isn’t the Oberfeldwebel here?’
‘Hang on. We’ll wait another five minutes.’
‘Not me. I’m going, but where? With these eyes of mine, I haven’t got a chance.’
‘Steady. Here, take a couple of breaths and leave the fags alone. You’ve got too much nicotine in you. Now go and stick your head out between those doors and have a look. Maybe that’s a truck I heard.’
Actually, there were three of them, two from farms and one from the Wehrmacht, but all drove in as if it were the end of the world, to slam on the brakes and leave engines running.
As Hartmann closed the big doors, men piled out and went to work, the tarp’s being flung back. ‘Bonzen shrieking at Bonzen held us up, Kohler,’ shouted Dillmann, tossing his cigarette away. ‘Einen Moment, bitte.’
Suckling piglets ready for the spit were chased by whole sides of beef and pork. Cages of chickens were noisy, those of ducklings too. Squash, carrots, cabbages and potatoes followed—liebe Zeit, were there no shortages? Onions by the sack came next, beets, too, for that much-loved borscht, sugar also and pears, apples, eggs, cheeses, grapes by the box but wine by the barrel this time.
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