Tapestry

by J. Robert Janes

  It was now or never and the look in the watery, fever-ridden, pouch-bagged Nordic eyes said as much. ‘My partner, General. He’s found something that could well lead us to one of the chief perpetrators of this plague of blackout crime.’

  ‘Something … Must I remind you that military men such as myself never like intangibles?’

  ‘The red ribbon of a Legion of Honour, General. You’re the first and only one to learn of it other than myself and our coroner.’

  ‘And that’s the way you would like it kept?’

  In spite of Boemelburg’s being the boss of all such Kripo. ‘Yes, General. The press …’

  ‘Those infernal bastards. I’m going to get them this time!’

  Overcome by a coughing fit, he grabbed the edge of the window then pushed the damned thing wide open. ‘Air …’ he gasped. ‘My chest. Verdammt, Kohler, can’t you see what those people have done to me? Das Stinkt zum Himmel!’

  It’s an absolute scandal. Paris-Soir, Le Matin—even today’s Pariser Zeitung—were seized from the desk and torn. ‘Mein Kirschwasser, Kohler.’ He flung an arm out to indicate a side table. ‘Gestapo Boemelburg was most kind and sent that bottle over as soon as he learned you and St-Cyr were back in the city.’

  A cherry brandy from Alsace and a warning should they come here, but there was only one glass, thank God. Boemelburg would, of course, have to be dealt with later. ‘The press, General.’

  The glass was drained, refilled and drained again. ‘Alsace was to your liking?’

  The gossip had already reached him. ‘Not entirely, General, but a successful conclusion to a difficult investigation.’

  Kohler couldn’t have put it better. For all the dissipation, skirt chasing and cavaliering, this former captain in the artillery hadn’t backed off when challenged, so good, yes, good. ‘A ribbon, you said?’

  ‘The killer’s, we believe, of the police academy’s victim.’

  ‘And the rapist who so savagely defiled the Trinité woman, Kohler? How did the one who stole that bicycle taxi know to take it and no other? Ach, don’t look so surprised. I’m not without my sources. Was that poor woman seen having a drink over there with one of my officers? Liebe Zeit, kommen Sie her. I’ll not give you the flu. I’ve been over it for days.’

  Across the rain-streaked wasteland of place de l’Opéra, where pedestrians scurried or darted down into the entrance to the métro and vélo-taxis struggled or parked themselves in line to wait for a fare, the Café de la Paix, on the corner of the boulevard des Capucines, looked inviting. A favourite of the staff here and elsewhere, business hadn’t stopped booming since mid-June 1940.

  ‘Was that woman there, Kohler, to arrange an assignation for later last night and if so, which of my officers was she with and did the one who attacked her see her with him and then overhear her lining up one of those infernal machines?’

  ‘She still hasn’t said anything beyond a few first words, General. I was on my way over to the café to question the staff and taxi drivers but the press … St-Cyr and myself can’t have them photographing us as we work. Let me leave the identity papers with you of the two who followed me here. Let me borrow their car since I need it more than they do and my partner is busy elsewhere.’

  The grey, bristled crown of that massive head was given an irritated brush with an equally irritated hand. ‘Shall I send them to Fritz Saukel’s forced-labour office? By evening they could be pouring concrete along the Atlantic Wall or digging bunkers in the Channel Islands, or would you prefer I ask Herr Oberg to consider them Sühnepersonen?’

  Expiators held as hostages until needed and then shot to atone for some act of terrorism, i.e., résistance. Wehrmacht through and through, Von Schaumburg really had little use for the SS and Gestapo. ‘Just put the two from Paris-Soir to work scrubbing the floors and toilets, General. I know those are spotless but another good scrubbing never hurt.’

  And spoken like a true soldier. ‘Find the one who wore that ribbon, Kohler, and bring him to me. I want a Wehrmacht solution to this problem the French have created for us.’

  All down the length of the rue des Rosiers not a cyclist could be seen hurrying through the rain, not a pedestrian, a hand-pulled cart or barrow.

  It’s as if the ghetto has become a ghost town, said St-Cyr sadly to himself. Repeated roundups since that of 16–17 July of last year had virtually left the quartier seemingly abandoned. Eight hundred and eighty-eight ‘teams’ of from three to four—Parisian flics and students, yes! from the police academy—nine thousand ‘cops’ in all had hit mainly five arrondissements in the small hours of that night. Arrests had, however, gone on all over the city—12,884 had been taken to the Vélodrome d’Hiver and subsequently deported, among them more than four thousand children. And now, of course, there are empty houses and apartments all over the city and country.

  The gilded letters of M. Meyer and Sons Vins et Liqueurs de Sion, of Zion, were still in place but the shelves and counters had been stripped. Alone, a black leather shoe, the left, lay on its side among the rubbish and next to a hastily packed suitcase whose contents had been strewn in the search for valuables.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said, rubbing a fist across the glass to clear it. ‘Hermann and myself weren’t here when you most needed us and didn’t think such a thing could possibly happen in France. But ever since then I’ve been building a dossier on Préfet Talbotte. He knows it, too, unfortunately, because I was foolish enough to have told him.’

  Foreign refugees and naturalized French citizens had been amongst the first taken. Sephardim from Spain, Portugal and North Africa who had fled the Spanish Revolution; Ashkenazim from Eastern Europe and the Reich who had fled the Nazis. Then, too, and since, there had been those whose families had been French for generations. Citizen French.

  The house at number 14 was empty. Not a stick of furniture remained, not a wall fixture, lamp or lightbulb, faucet or basin. Friedman and his family could be in any of the camps or already ‘up the stack’ as Hermann and he had had to hear an SS say at the Konzentrationslager Natzweiler-Struthof in Alsace.

  Above the entrance to the house, the curly-haired, ruff-encircled stone head of a smiling young woman from the Middle Ages gave welcome to all who entered. The street was not that of the rosebushes as commonly thought, but of the ros, the teeth along the raddle or wooden bar over and through which the warp was drawn as it was wound on to the beam of the loom to keep its width constant and prevent it from being entangled.

  Many other houses and apartments in the quartier and elsewhere had been emptied just like this of their furnishings and fittings, even the doors and hinges in some cases.

  ‘The Aktion-M squads,’ he said. The M was for Möbel, the Deutsch for furniture.

  They’d been thorough, those squads of Parisian labourers and their masters. All items thought useful to resettled or bombed-out Germans, especially those of the SS and Gestapo in the newly acquired Lebensraum of Slavic countries, had been taken. One special task force, the Sonderstab Musik, dealt only with the musical instruments of the deported. Three warehouses alone just to the north of the city were crammed with pianos; one other, on the rue de Bassano, but a few steps to the east of the Étoile and off the Champs-Élysées in the Eighth and Sixteenth and very close to the SS of the avenue Foch and the French Gestapo of the rue Lauriston, held trumpets, clarinets, violins and violas, et cetera. Last year alone, forty thousand tons of such furnishings had been shipped to that Lebensraum, and yes indeed Préfet Talbotte had availed himself of the safe-deposit-box contents of some of those who had been deported and had been threatened with exposure, but had now chosen to be accommodating.

  ‘Because of what it implies, Hermann isn’t going to like where that stamp collection came from,’ he said aloud and to himself alone, ‘but first, the seller of it, Mademoiselle Noëlle Jourdan of 25 place des Vosges.’

  The Café de la Paix occupied much of the ground floor of the Hôtel Grand, that sumptuous palace of seven hundred ro
oms that had been opened on the fifth of May 1862 by the Empress Eugénie. A home away from home, the café was busy even though at three forty-seven in the afternoon most should have been working. Wasn’t there a war on?

  Of course there was, Kohler silently snorted as another waiter brusquely squeezed past him with a heavily laden tray, and everywhere there was the aroma of real coffee mingled with those of expensive perfume and pungent with tobacco smoke. Nice … Ach du lieber Gott, it must be, but if the Führer only knew. Certainly not all here were with their girlfriends; certainly too, though, among the ranks present there wasn’t one below that of a Leutnant, but didn’t the Führer desperately need men at the Russian front?

  Uniform or not, Blitzmädel or not, the Occupier behaved as if he or she had the world by the balls. Here also there was none of that Nur Attrapen, that Only-for-Show nonsense on bar bottles of coloured water as seen in the everyday citizen’s watering holes, none of those demands for ration tickets or the chalked-up pas d’alcools signs that spelled out the no-alcohol days. Though many of the Parisiennes glanced up at him from their tables, their men friends seemed not to notice and were too busily on the make or simply couldn’t be bothered even though they damned well must know he was a cop and why he was here clutching a copy of Le Matin.

  Louis would have said, Look closer still. See how a waiter nods in answer to a male whisper, then gives a curt nod towards a table where someone else’s petite amie flashes downcast eyes—pimping, are they, some of these waiters? Hasn’t a carefully passed one hundred-­franc note just been tucked away? Girls and middle-aged women, some with their wedding rings hidden, who hang on every word their companions utter even though some of them can’t understand too many and are doing their best to catch up three nights a week—was it three that Madame Adrienne Guillaumet left her children alone in the flat and went to the École Centrale to teach Deutsch to females such as these and to older men? Older, since there aren’t too many young Frenchman around are there?

  Had her assailant known of her? Louis would have asked and said, Oh for sure, that taxi was stolen from the stand out there, but more importantly, from in here one can see whether such a theft was possible and when best to strike.

  Had her assailant been watching for her, Hermann, having stalked her for days or weeks only to at last lift his glass or cup in salute and silently say, All right, ma fille, it’s now your turn?

  A regular, Hermann, of this establishment and others, the Lido especially, or had he been one of her students?

  Must every possibility be examined, and if so, if some of the waiters were pimping, weren’t others betraying those same girls to those who would do them harm? Beyond the heavily draped, plush burgundy curtains that would be tightly closed during the blackout, there were bird’s-eye views of place de l’Opéra and the white-railed entrance to the métro whose subterranean-leading slot opened on to the boulevard des Capucines like an inclined mine shaft. Any female leaving that entrance and heading for the café would be seen well before she got here; seen, too, if earnestly engaging a taxi for later, or had she been sitting here for an hour or more at one of these tables or at one out under the awning and next to the warmth of that charcoal brazier, she smiling shyly, listening intently and maybe, yes, maybe laying a hand fondly on that of her lover? Had she been upstairs first, eh, to one of those seven hundred rooms since officers and Bonzen from home were billeted in many of them? Sure the officers, and all others in uniform, weren’t supposed to take women to their rooms, but who the hell was going to police such a thing in a place like this? Had her lover been one of Von Schaumburg’s men? Had he got up and gone out there to hire that taxi for her and chosen Take Me simply because he had known that’s what she wanted or had already let him have?

  A child’s birthday cake, Hermann, Louis would have cautioned. The flour, the sugar …

  ‘MONSIEUR, I MUST INSIST THAT YOU DO NOT WANDER ABOUT AMONG THE TABLES GETTING IN THE ROAD. PLEASE OBEY THE NOTICE AND WAIT IN LINE TO BE SEATED!’

  Lieber Christus im Himmel, what the hell was this and from a mere waiter? ‘Gestapo, mon fin. Kripo, Paris-Central. A few small questions. Nothing difficult unless you want to make it that way. Clear a table. Ja, that one will do, and bring me a café noir avec un pousse-café.’

  A black coffee with a liqueur. Louis would have loved it. His partner playing Gestapo, but only when absolutely necessary. ‘Spit in them and I’ll not just see you arrested but shot.’

  4

  Number 25 place des Vosges was little different from the rest of the thirty-six arcaded pavilions whose steeply pitched roofs with dormers were sometimes bull’s-eye-windowed. Loose slates gave momentarily trapped cascades. Broken, once-painted shutters were open.

  ‘From a swamp to a palace to a horse market, to this,’ said St-Cyr sadly to himself. Grand-maman had said that to him once, that good woman having dragged him here at the age of six to learn a little history.

  He’d been particularly bad, had stolen from her handbag. Just a few centimes … Well, five actually. Always, though, the memory would come rushing at him when here, no matter how desperate the circumstance. ‘A sliver, Jean-Louis,’ she had said. ‘A splinter from the lance of his opponent. Who would have thought such a thing possible? A king? Henry II and a bout of jousting? Oh for sure, they didn’t have carousels whose operators demanded cash. They were far too busy, but a little fun all the same, eh? A careless impulse? A tournament whose spine of heartwood found the visor slit of his armour to pierce the eye and brain!’

  She had given him a moment to think about a life of crime and then had said, ‘He died in agony, screaming for his mother.’

  Beyond the high iron fence that surrounded the park where duels had once been fought, the ruins of last summer’s community vegetable plots made their graveyards among the severely pollarded plane trees. Lonely on his stone steed, Louis XIII ignored the wet snow that struck him and indicated the plots as if mystified to find them here.

  The house at Number 25 was crowded but the presence of a police officer had rapidly filtered on ahead. Gingerly he went up the stairs, keeping as close to the wall as possible. From somewhere distant came the impatient pause-by-pause thumping of wood on wood, but soon that ceased. Even the concierge had broken the law and shut her loge, failing entirely to respond to his earnest knock. He’d read the ‘flat’ number from the decaying list she had posted in 1935, having crossed out names and added others since.

  With frozen laundry to his left and a mildewed wall to the right, he came to the room or rooms of the Jourdan father and daughter, the mother having died probably some time ago, Hermann had said.

  There was no doorknob, no latch, no lock—nothing but a dirty bit of string to be tied to a nail, no nameplate either, its bronze frame having been unscrewed and sold.

  The distant sound of pigeons came, the scrabbling, too, of caged guinea pigs and other livestock. Nudging the door open would be easy, the string having been left to dangle. Knocking with the muzzle of the Lebel would be best.

  ‘Entrez,’ came the gruff response, exuding, though, both strength and determination, its owner having been forewarned by the bush telegraph. A corridor connected open room to open room, its floor bare but catching the grey light of day from the far end.

  Jourdan was sitting at an iron-legged garden table before French windows the constant rain had done nothing to clean. ‘Monsieur … ’ began St-Cyr.

  Guiltily the revolver was tucked away. ‘It’s Sergeant, Inspector. The Fifty-Sixth Chasseurs à Pied under Driant.’

  ‘The Bois des Caures and a key defence at Verdun. The eastern bank of the Meuse and a forest no more than five hundred metres by a thousand.’

  ‘Into which the Boche poured eighty thousand artillery shells.’

  ‘Early on the morning of the twenty-first of February 1916, after days of rain, a little sunshine came to dry the ground and prepare it for the assault but did God really want it to dry, I wonder, though I commend you, Sergeant. We al
l did, all of us who were at Verdun.’

  The red ribbon of the Légion d’honneur was not present and should have been, but that of the Croix de guerre was there and the yellow and green of the Médaille militaire with its rosette in the buttonhole.

  ‘They couldn’t kill all of us Chasseurs, could they?’ taunted Jourdan.

  Falkenhayn’s Operation Judgement had met surprisingly stiff resistance when the advance had been launched after that opening barrage.

  ‘The tempest of fire,’ said Jourdan, watching him closely. ‘Nine out of ten of us were finished in that first barrage, myself among them. Though I’ve the Boche to thank, I’ve hated them ever since for having saved me. Now, to what do I owe the pleasure of a visit from a fellow veteran?’

  Jourdan was a grand mutilé and had lost the left arm at the elbow and the right leg just below the hip. The crutch that had made its sound of wood on wood had all but lost its rubber stopper and was leaning against the only other chair. He was bundled up against the cold and the damp and with writing materials, the prosthesis he used lying ready beside a neat little stack of at least seven letters waiting to be taken to the post.

  ‘When the ink isn’t frozen, I write to my friends,’ he said, the accent clearly of the east and Nancy. An open packet of Gauloises bleues and a scattered box of matches indicated impatience.

  ‘One of those fucking matches threw sparks into my face.’

  They were always doing that. ‘At least you have cigarettes.’

  ‘I budget myself. The half, and then a few hours later, the other half.’

  And the agony between. ‘Sergeant, your daughter …’

  ‘Yes, yes, was dismissed from the Hôtel-Dieu. Now what are we to do, eh? Am I to send her out on the streets like all those other bitches are doing? She’s young, she’s beautiful. Certainly she has the urges—what girl of that age wouldn’t—but she’s mine, Inspector. Mine, and comes from a good home. The two of us would rather starve to death than sacrifice her little capital to one of those bastards from the other side of the Rhine. Some crimes can never be forgiven or forgotten, and a woman’s having sex with the enemy is one of them.’