‘Those shoes, Hermann, were meant for her. Bien sûr, they didn’t quite fit. Not wanting to be so visible, she probably made up some excuse for not being able to go to Monnier herself in mid-August of last year and must have given Nicole Bordeaux her size and other details.’
‘That consumptive?’
‘That socialite who has made it her life’s role to bring Occupier and Occupied together so as to foster collaboration and country-to-country tours for musicians like Cortot or singers like Maurice Chevalier, artists as well, and writers, actresses and actors. Gatherings, Hermann, every two weeks at her mansion on the rue de La Boétie.’
Right in the heart of where the Occupier felt safest. Not two blocks from Gestapo and Sûreté headquarters and but a pleasant stroll or drive from the SD and SS on the avenue Foch.
Good, Hermann was beginning to see the gravity of things. ‘The shoes were to have gone with the dress, the slip and all the rest that Madame Bordeaux had chosen for her. Everything—now get this, please—was delivered a good fourteen months ago to Studio 51, Salle Pleyel, home of Les Amies françaises.’
‘An escort service?’
Disbelief had registered in Hermann’s expression. ‘Me, I think you should be asking whose.’
‘And I’m waiting. Everything we know so far counters what you’ve just said. An onderduiker, eine Mischlinge?’
‘Mademoiselle Jacqueline Lemaire.’
‘Mistress of Hector Bolduc? That girl can’t be selling herself to the Occupier. Not our Anna-Marie.’
‘But she is fluent in Deutsch, Hermann, and she does need to hide, so she becomes an usherette at the concerts and finds herself a part-time job in the Frontbuchhandlung.’
‘The what?’
‘You heard me.’
‘Where she’s in one-on-one direct contact with the Occupier? Christ, has she nerves of bloody steel?’
‘Or simply those of utter commitment, having lost her family, the house she grew up in, and no doubt more recently the boy she was engaged to. Oh for sure, she could have negotiated a set of false papers herself, but acquiring those requires a certain finesse, otherwise one gets taken and/or betrayed.’
‘And if help is given, help is then demanded, eh? That one-on-one contact would have allowed her to listen closely and relay whatever she found out to whomever has been helping her.’
‘Precisely, for I also found the key she had had made to the roofs and the little farm she and Concierge Figeard tend. The farming she probably took up shortly after having moved in during the third week of June 1941, but that key, mon vieux, would have needed a wax impression.’
Trust Louis to have found it. ‘An FTP équipe?’
‘Or one of the others. Help certainly. Nicole Bordeaux could well have encountered her at the concerts and in that bookshop. Repeated sightings would engender questions about her and, satisfied with such an unofficial security clearance, Madame Bordeaux would finally have spoken to her.’
‘She then ordering up the shoes and all the rest to be delivered last August, since interpreters are always desperately needed at such cultural gatherings and pretty girls had better be properly dressed, even if it was only one outfit and not a dozen.’
French parsimony, but Hermann held a finger up to signal a pause as he lit them both further cigarettes.
‘Girls with virtually no money, Louis.’
‘Students at the Sorbonne, Hermann. You see, our girl has avidly been working on a dissertation about the place of the Benedictine in medieval France.’
‘She knew of l’Abbaye de Vauclair?’
‘Didn’t I tell you it was a minefield? In that all but barren room of hers were drawings, plans and details of monasteries from here to Amsterdam and return, way-stops for that fiancé to have used, only he failed to arrive.’
‘So she had to make another trip. She’s a skirt, she’s young, she’s pretty and fluent in what’s needed in certain circles but vulnerable as well, so a little help given at the right moment might bring its later reward. Did Hector Bolduc offer it and the use of one of those bank vans of his? Is that why she left the one to walk ahead to the other, she realizing freedom was at hand and she had better leave while she could?’
‘Or was that arrangement laid on, Hermann? You see, Figeard, her concierge, mentioned that when she returned from her first trip last December, they shared a dinner to which she brought the half of a bottle of Château Latour.’
‘From the Haut-Médoc where a certain banker has been avidly buying up vineyards and châteaux.’
‘We absolutely have to pin down why and how that truck she was in met up with that van.’
‘And why they were then able to follow it to l’Abbaye de Vauclair.’
Helga, obviously now believing she had finally landed Hermann as a potential husband, interrupted things with a bottle of Danziger Goldwasser whose tiny flecks seemed to dance in its delightful concoction of orange peal, anise, herbs and eighty proof.
‘That gold’s real, Louis. Even the Führer has overlooked recovering it but obviously Rudi is on our side.’
‘But only for the moment, so don’t compound our troubles. Let your mind dwell on these instead, for I’ve saved the worst news for the last.’
Tightly wrapped in a small twist of the newspaper Louis always used when saving bullet slugs and other evidence, were a good dozen tiny crystals. As his hand quickly closed over them to keep from prying eyes, Kohler heard himself saying, ‘Lieber Gott, why us, why now when this goddamned war and Occupation have to be grinding down?’
‘God never questions what might or might not happen to people like us, Hermann, but our Anna-Marie can’t have told anyone of the kilo of these she has in the tin box I found. They’ve been there since at least that first visit home last December.’
‘Even though it’s only boart, and the cheapest of the cheapest, that kilo must be worth an absolute fortune especially on the marché noir. Any FTP équipe worth its salt would have promptly sold the lot if they’d known of them.’
‘Precisely, but as the inscription in his pocket watch indicated, the father was a much-valued and trusted employee and would have hidden them in a place he and Anna-Marie knew of, the mother also, probably, but the diamonds didn’t belong to him, and that girl would have known this. They must have been hidden just as the Blitzkrieg was upon them. Perhaps it is that his employer, Diamant Meyerhof, asked him and other employees to do just such a thing.’
‘Maybe there’s far more, then, that we don’t yet know of.’
For now, felt St-Cyr, he wouldn’t tell Hermann of the others, but would simply say, ‘And that is why we must return to those ruins. You see, when I was looking for her at that spring, I found virtually no trace of her having even run that way. Instead, there was simply a fern, one of whose fronds had been instinctively snapped, probably as she had heard that second shot. She then took care to leave no further trace as she returned to the edge of the clearing at the ruins, but deliberately flattened two saplings, tramping them until hidden by the tall grass and brush.’
‘To mark the spot?’
‘But not for herself, for others probably, since she already knew where the spring would be and the path that still exists.’
‘Did she hide something?’
‘Given what we’ve uncovered, I think she must have.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Deniard and Paquette both suffered from “poor” eyesight.’
‘Yet were given a shotgun and a hell of a lot of responsibility.’
‘Also Herr Ludin has asked to see you first thing tomorrow at number eighty-four.’
‘Where I won’t be telling him anything because we can’t, but you’d better let me know what you did tell him when you shoved that mégot tin at him here.’
Good, Hermann had been watching the two of them earlier. ‘Havi
ng also threatened Gabrielle, I had to tell him something.’
‘And?’
‘He knows you failed to tell him of it and that we feel it’s not the killer’s, but that one of those with the truck is an informant who has been leaving coins for them to find and follow.’
‘That Spitzel won’t have killed her, Louis. He can’t have because he can’t fail his masters.’
‘But did she tell that passeur and his assistant of her doubts about him, Hermann? That is the question.’
‘She can’t have because she would have known only too well that he would then have killed them too. Instead, she’s biding her time and hoping against hope that they get into Paris where she can then escape and call on those who have helped her in the past before that Spitzel rats on the passeur, the firebox feeder and herself.’
A pleasant thought. ‘Now me to Gabrielle, for I absolutely have to warn her.’
‘And me to Oona and Giselle.’
Forbidden at 2147 hours, or at any other time after dark, lights blazed from the shop Enchantement. Sickened by the sight from across the place Vendôme, Kohler hit the brakes. Oona and Giselle had been taken. Heinrich Ludin hadn’t hesitated. That son of a bitch must have been waiting outside Chez Rudi’s and had seen him duck in to sit down with Louis. Those sadists of the blackout control were everywhere, flics too, and generals and other higher-ups, for these last must have poured from the Ritz, their dinner napkins dangling.
In a rage, one of them nearly tore the car door off as the Citroën pulled up. ‘KOHLER, WHY HAVE YOU AND THAT … THAT FRENCHMAN NOT STOPPED THIS? BANDITEN, I TELL YOU, KOHLER. TERRORISTEN!’
Ach, mein Gott, it was the Kommandant von Gross-Paris. ‘Just leave it to me, General. Go back to your dinner.’
‘Back? When those dear ladies need to be calmed and that entrance replaced and the door upstairs to the flat?’
Only a Prussian could have overlooked the tragedy of what had really happened. ‘I’ll just go and speak to them, General. Maybe they can be more specific.’
‘Specific, is it? Did I not say Banditen?’
A fortune in lingerie and lace had been trampled or stolen. Broken glass was everywhere. Aphrodite’s alabaster breasts no longer beckoned, nor did Diana’s, she having lost her bow and arrow, and as for the flimsily clad, limbless, headless mannequins, the wrecking bar had done its worst.
Dense, a cloud of unleashed perfume filled the air. Crystal phials lay among the ruin, scattered cosmetics, too, and bath salts, soaps, powders, garter belts, silk stockings and lace-trimmed step-ins. Ducking past the cluttered office, he came at last to the stairs only to stop at the sight of Giselle’s pom-pom slippers. She had tried to fight the attackers off and had been thrown down the stairs. Blood was flecked here, there, everywhere, Oona’s white ribbon—the one she always used to tie back her hair before bed—was dangling from the railing.
Diminutive—never anything but vivacious and always perfectly turned out and looking years younger than she really was—Chantal Grenier, that beautiful blonde-haired dove from yesteryear, clutched a torn nightdress to her bare bosom while stern-eyed Muriel Barteaux, far taller, bigger, stronger, tougher and still wearing the usual broad-lapelled iron-grey pinstripe and dark-blue tie, tried to comfort her lifelong companion and business partner.
The voice was of gravel. ‘Chantal … Chantal, mon ange, it’s Hermann. He and Jean-Louis will bring them back.’
‘Louis isn’t …’ began Kohler.
‘Raped, Monsieur Hermann,’ shrilled Chantal. ‘Defiled, I tell you! The throat of the one slashed while the other has tried to stop them. They’ll be violated, my Muriel! Mutilated, the one forced to watch as the other is … Ah Sainte Mère, Sainte Mère, they will scream but it will be of no use. None, I tell you!’
‘Chantal … Chantal …’
‘Easy, little one. Easy,’ urged Kohler, wrapping his arms about the two of them. ‘Louis isn’t with me but as soon as he is, we’ll find them and take care of things. Make her down a stiff cognac, Muriel, and then sip another. Find her something to nibble on. A biscuit, a crust—anything so long as it settles her.’
He looked as if in tears himself, thought Muriel, and though it was very dangerous to say such a thing, she could with Hermann and had better. ‘They threatened to expose us. They said that since the Nazis would love to burn us at the stake, they would, and that as soon as they had finished what they had to do, they were going to torch the shop and make sure we never left it.’
‘Frenchmen, Monsieur Hermann, in two big cars. Two, I tell you, and ten of them. Ten! Résistants. La Croix de Lorraine!’
‘Nonsense,’ said Muriel, her expression enough to shatter the thought. ‘I already pay those people far too much to leave us alone.’
‘PPF, then, a hit squad of them?’ asked Kohler.
Ah, mon Dieu, what was this? ‘One did shout to the others …’
‘Let me, my Muriel. “The corner of the boul’ Victor Hugo and rue de Rouvray.”’
And in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the villa Gestapo Boemelburg used for those whose countries of origin, passports, politics, finances and such were suspect but who required far gentler treatment than usual. It would be blackmail for sure from that Hamburg Kriminalrat, but Louis would be the first to ask, Now what are you going to do about it? Submit or tell him absolutely nothing?
Muriel was using a sleeve to gently wipe Chantal’s eyes. ‘Look, I’ll see that this is paid for in cash and otherwise. Louis will too.’
Would it break his heart all the more if she were to tell him? wondered Muriel.
Intuitively Chantal understood and, wrapping her arms more firmly about her, lifted herself up to whisper, ‘You must, ma chère.’
‘One of the others shouted that they should drive by Rudy’s place to show him what he was missing, Hermann, that Jean-Louis had this morning not only been unkind to their tires and headlamps, but insulting.’
That Rudy being Rudy de Mérode, not Rudi of Chez Rudi’s.
Alone, felt St-Cyr, and as if left out for him on her dressing table at the Club Mirage on the rue Delambre in Montparnasse was the crystal phial of scent that would immediately invoke its memories. ‘Exquisite,’ he said, as when first encountered early last December, Muriel Barteaux having designed it especially for Gabi and named it after the club. ‘Mirage,’ he went on, ‘those three initials on this cigarette case being N. K. M.: Natalya Kulakov-Myshkin and a Russian who had escaped from the revolution in 1917, losing her family en route and having arrived alone in Paris at the age of fourteen, a survivor, a chanteuse.’
Seemingly, he still hadn’t realized that her last number had come to its end, the club packed as always with the Occupier, they all shouting for her to return. ‘Jean-Louis …’
Replacing the stopper, he didn’t look up to see her sheathed as she was in shimmering sky-blue silk, felt Gabrielle. Perhaps he was remembering the brown whipcord jodhpurs she had worn at the mill on the Loire, or was it the open hacking jacket?
No lipstick or makeup as now, thought St-Cyr, her hair tied back with a bit of brown velvet and not blonde at all, as first thought, but the shade of a very fine brandy, her eyes of a violet matched only by those of Hermann’s Giselle.
‘Every time I hear you sing, Gabrielle, I’m exactly like all of those out there, and Muriel too, filled and lifted entirely out of myself and present difficulties. You know, of course, that there are those who will never forgive you for having sung for the Occupier. Isn’t it time you thought of stopping, or is it that you feel the Führer, with all his wisdom, will turn this conflict around and defeat the Russians, and the Allies who are now mercilessly bombing his cities?’
‘Those boys out there and along the front need me as do soldiers everywhere, no matter which side they’re on. Even Charles Maurice would have wanted me to continue.’
A lie, of course, for Captain Thé
riault, the dead husband, had prevented her from singing and had insisted, as most Frenchmen would, and had the right, that she stay home with their son, an absence Muriel had lamented, only to then find Gabi after the defeat and at the Mirage.
Though it would do no good to say it, and she was very much of the Résistance herself, he had better. ‘The Banditen will never forgive you. Why skate so close to the edge when you don’t have to?’
‘Is it that you think my René Yvon-Paul needs me?’
René was now eleven and lived with his grandmother, the countess, at the Château Thériault near Vouvray.
‘Me, I sing because for me, I have to, Jean-Louis. But why, please, when you must know this dressing room of mine could well have ears, is it that you should say such things so loudly?’
‘Because we never whisper and they need to hear it from yourself.’
The Gestapo’s Listeners—their Watchers too, the ones who had deliberately left that Résistance bomb on his doorstep early last December, tragically killing his second wife and little son instead. ‘I think I need a cigarette.’
Seldom did she use those, but always they were Russian but not from the stems of the plant. ‘Of course. Forgive me. Here … here, sit, please, at your dressing table. Rest. You put so much of yourself into every song, you must be exhausted.’
‘Then light it for me.’
She was trembling, he was, too. Ah merde, what the hell was happening to them?
He held her. They did not kiss, they clung, and when at last he had relaxed his hold, it was herself who whispered, ‘Merci, mon amour, I didn’t know for sure and now do.’
Only then did they kiss, something Hermann was never going to hear of for fear he would never shut up about it.
Taking out his little notebook, Jean-Louis found a blank page and wrote: Sonderkommando. An informant. A submarine they want who knows something Berlin must absolutely have. A Kriminalrat who has threatened Oona and Giselle, yourself as well.
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