Tapestry

by J. Robert Janes

  ‘Gently,’ breathed Kohler, taking the Schmeisser from him. ‘We wouldn’t want to ruin anything else, now would we?’

  In the cold, grey light of dawn they shared a cigarette but would it be their last? wondered Kohler. What they had uncovered wasn’t good. Too many in high places were being threatened; all would flock together, none would let two dumb Schweinebullen continue to interfere as they had most definitely. Jeannot Raymond might well arrive thinking to find Suzette Dunand waiting for him, but what of Delaroche, or of Sonja Remer and the Standartenführer Langbehn?

  What of Oberg and even of von Behr, who wasn’t going to like the problem they had left on that Lévitan doorstep?

  What of Judge Rouget and Vivienne, of the others too, that still shadowy and probably never-to-be-named group of men of influence who met at the Cercle de l’Union Interaliée to finance and advise Delaroche’s campaign of teaching POW wives and fiancées not to misbehave?

  ‘Too much is at stake, Hermann, too many are threatened.’

  The cigarette was returned, the time, the moment, one of silence.

  Caught between the Marne and the Seine, the Bois de Vincennes stretched bare branches up into the fog. Immediately beyond the Lac des Minimes, the keep, the donjon of the Château de Vincennes, all 52 metres (about 170 feet) of it could barely be seen, rising as it did higher and higher to a turret at each of the four corners, one of which carried a swastika every bit as huge as that atop the Eiffel Tower and not a breath of wind.

  ‘Six hundred, a thousand, Hermann. Two thousand? How many men garrison that stronghold?’

  ‘I’d worry about what the Wehrmacht have got stored under that keep.’

  High explosives, artillery shells and ammunition.******** They had left Oona at the Hôtel-Dieu, had asked for Matron Aurore Aumont if possible and had said they’d be back soon, a lie of course but … ‘Oona’s the one for you, Hermann. Stop all this talk of a little place on the Costa del Sol with Giselle tending the bar and having babies Oona will take care of. You need her desperately and she needs you now more than ever.’

  Hermann had held her all the way there. ‘And Giselle?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ll find her. I promise.’

  ‘I just wish I had your confidence.’

  A Peugeot four-door sedan, dark green under the fog’s sweat, was parked outside 45 bis avenue de la Belle-Gabrielle not far from the Château’s keep but looking damned lonely as such would these days. Kohler used a fist to clear side windscreen. ‘Ah, Christ, Louis,’ he said, that sinking feeling in him all too evident. They should have had plenty of time to get in place but now had none.

  A teddy bear, torn from Suzette Dunand’s grasp, lay on the backseat. On the floor there was a small suitcase, beside this, a shopping bag that had toppled over as its cognac bottle had been grabbed and taken away.

  ‘I should have seen it, Hermann. I knew we should have been more careful with that girl. This place … It’s freely open to the public only on Thursday afternoons from 1400 to 1600 hours. At all other times permission must be obtained.’

  No casual visitors. ‘And now you tell me.’

  Gilded fleurs-de-lis surmounted the tall, wrought-iron gates which, partly open, looked as if having been unlocked by an attendant who had had no wish to hang around and yet had had to do as bidden. Louis wasn’t happy about it. ‘Adrienne Guillaumet’s husband spent an extended tour of duty in Indochina. He and that father of his would be known to several other officers and men, one or more of whom could be involved.’

  ‘And there are veterans and veterans from that other war.’

  ‘I was here in 1920 when the memorial to the Annamite dead was consecrated. Brave men, good men. That temple, pagoda, dinh or communal house whose red tiled roofs so beautifully point towards heaven at their corners, is magnificent. There are rooms you wouldn’t expect, ironwood pillars—I counted at least sixty. Carvings that are exquisite, individual memorials to many of the fallen, altars to the gods of this and that, as well as to the Buddha.’

  ‘Let’s just hope we’re not too late.’

  ‘They can’t have let that girl live.’

  There was no one waiting under the Chinese gate. How could there have been? One could wish for another time to cross this courtyard or walk through a garden which, in summer, would be tropical, not under blankets of last autumn’s leaves or wrapped in layers of burlap sacking, its monuments and statues to the fallen looking not just damned lonely but eerie in a silence that was broken only by the sound of gravel underfoot.

  ‘Hermann, there’s a passage that runs beside the temple. Two-metre-high sandstone bas-reliefs, copied from those in the avenue at Angkor Wat, line this. You’ll find them strange and frightening if coming upon them suddenly. Battle scenes from the holy books and epics of the Hindu. Remember, please, that not only will you be driven to feel as one with those men, you’ll be distracted. It can’t be helped, not after Verdun and all the rest we had to face in that other war.’

  Everyone listened but no sound was heard, Suzette was certain. Dragons in dark, highly polished wood, their bulging eyes glistening as they watched her and waited, were coiled about the pillars or lying stretched along the rafters as if but awakened to what was happening and going to happen to her. Brightly painted terra-cotta unicorns tensely waited with phoenixes and turtles and they, too, seemed to listen and to watch. A polychrome Buddha waited, sitting on a lotus blossom. Spiralled incense coils—tall, open, white-ribbed cones—waited as they hung above the altar of this crowded shrine whose joss sticks the colonel had lit to smoulder constantly before the ash urns of the dead behind which were the framed photographs in glass of their owners, all of whom were in uniform.

  Though there had been no sound that could have been heard, Bob had given warning and rigidly watched the block-printed red silk hangings that formed a screen over the doorway to this shrine. Colonel Delaroche had carefully redoubled his hold on the leash, Jeannot Raymond stood behind her, waiting too, as did the dead of that other war to whom relatives had burned further joss sticks before each photograph and had left offerings of money. Banknotes that had been printed in France in 1939 and never sent out, the colonel had said to Jeannot Raymond, who had caught her as she had hurried down the steps of the Concorde station and had forced her to come with him after first telephoning the colonel.

  Bob didn’t move. Bob was very still, the two of them watching him and not herself, but would it matter, could it? Her hands were tied tightly behind her back. They had stuffed a kerchief into her mouth. The knife that would be used was still lying on the table before her and, among the reflections from its black lacquer, she could clearly see those of the incense coils and the dragons. ‘An old friend,’ Jeannot Raymond had said of that knife he had brought from Argentina. A gaucho’s knife with a long and shallow groove on either side and almost the whole length of the blade to hold and drain away the blood—her blood—once the throat had been slashed. He would simply pick it up, grab her by the hair, yank her head back and cut her throat as he’d done to others, she was certain of this. A knife whose blade was twenty centimetres long at least, two in width at the top and razor sharp, with a flattened, S-shaped guard, the handle beautifully embossed with what looked to be hammered, coppery-silver designs of crisscrossed triangles, curves, ridges and countless patterns.

  ‘One kills to feel it,’ Colonel Delaroche had said to her before Bob had stiffened. ‘Though the time of the gauchos was long ago, Jeannot employed only those who could prove they were descendants.’

  ‘The only honest human beings,’ that one had said. ‘Whenever possible they would use no other weapon than the facón each carried at the waist in its sheath, behind the back.’

  Perhaps that knife weighed two hundred grams. Certainly it must be light for such a length. ‘The gavilán,’ he had said of it in Argentinian Spanish. ‘The balance has to be absolutely perfect. This one’s short by a good ten centimetres because I wanted it that way.’

  Wan
ted it …

  Bob fidgeted. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the smell of the burning joss, it was, Suzette was certain, that their scent reminded him of someone and that this then made him uneasy.

  Again and again it came to them: the softest rustling—rats? wondered Kohler. Was it backup Delaroche had called in? Curtained doorways to niche memorials had been deliberately drawn, others left open. Bongs, gongs, drums, funeral biers, flags, bowls and urns—lieber Christus im Himmel, the bloody crap was bound to get in the way. A life-sized bronze Buddha sat behind the main altar, glowing softly in the ever-subdued light, waiting, it seemed, for something to happen. Others of wood were seated about in shades of dark varying to a light rose-amber, one with a hand raised in caution—was it caution—all eyes closed, the expressions beatific?

  Merde, the rustling was stronger now. Louis hadn’t moved from where he was standing just inside the main entrance. Backlit by the growing light of day, he was a perfect target.

  Now louder, the rustling put one on edge. Louis jabbed with the Lebel to indicate something off to the side in front of him. An altar. Joss sticks, bowls, urns, rows and rows of short strips of thin, reddish-purple paper with vertical lines of writing on them—hundreds and hundreds of these hung directly above one another from horizontally mounted bamboo rods, forming a panel maybe a metre-and-a-half wide by two in height. ‘Token offerings,’ he whispered, all but mouthing the words. Promises to the dead, for when times get better, wondered Kohler; items given, even with the shortages; good deeds done in the eternal quest to influence one’s karma?

  The fog must be clearing. Air was moving through the dinh and, as each gust passed by, it lifted the loose ends of the paper offerings, one after another, row with row, and carried joss smoke up from behind a curtained door halfway along that side.

  ‘Don’t kill her, Colonel. Let’s talk.’

  There was no answer.

  Curtains of block-printed red silk were parted. ‘Colonel …’

  ‘Put that gun down, Kohler. Don’t and she dies,’ said Delaroche.

  Jeannot Raymond had a knife like no other at her throat, the kid in tears.

  The Walther P38 made its sound as it struck the glossy-black lacquer of the table. ‘Louis,’ he called, throwing the name over a shoulder, ‘the bastards have got me.’ There’d been nothing else he could have done. Nothing.

  ‘Join us, St-Cyr,’ called out Delaroche.

  ‘He must have gone to check that passage,’ offered Hermann.

  ‘Then we’ll wait. You two … Why couldn’t you have done what you were supposed to?’

  ‘Find the Trinité victim and then those of the Restaurant Drouant but nothing else, not the killing of Max Auger at the police academy and that of Élène Artur, or those of Noëlle Jourdan and her dear papa?’

  ‘Kohler, Kohler, why the hell couldn’t you simply have agreed to Herr Oberg’s request? A simple enough thing, a freshly baited little trap he still has in mind.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘False papers—did you really think Jeannot wouldn’t anticipate your trying to get this girl away from us? These are good, by the way. Proof enough of what you two are capable of. Boemelburg will have to see them.’

  A little squeeze, was that it? ‘Don’t even bother, my fine one. I often pick them up on the black market to show the chief how the quality is always improving.’

  ‘Lie if you wish, but join us.’

  ‘With a French army MAS 1935A pointing at me? Eight of the 7.65 Long in the box and one up the spout? More than enough fire power to counter a Lebel 1873 with those old cartridges, eh, as this one must know?’

  The shot when it came, filled the dinh with its sound. St-Cyr caught his chest, cried out, HERMANN! silently and said, a whisper, ‘Forgive me, mon vieux. I should have seen what they’d do because we gave them no other choice.’

  Bob had been startled by the shot and had hunkered down beside that master of his, but now lifted woeful eyes as a hand was extended. Tentatively he sniffed at it, rejoiced, licked it eagerly and let his ears and chin be gently fondled.

  ‘Colonel, tell that son of a bitch to take that knife away from her throat and pull the gag before she chokes on her vomit.’

  St-Cyr had still not come. ‘We also have the Van der Lynn woman, Kohler.’

  ‘Oona?’

  That had startled Kohler. ‘Taken yesterday, but surely you were aware of this?’

  The one with the knife hadn’t let up, but was it that these two still didn’t know what had happened at the Lévitan? In too much of a hurry to grab the girl and get here? No time, then. No time. ‘We looked for Oona but couldn’t find her, Colonel.’

  Then why not ask where she was being held? Instead, Kohler warily glanced from Jeannot to himself as if uncertain of where things would now lead, and in the end, again reached out to Bob.

  ‘Believe me, Kohler, we really do have that woman of yours.’

  ‘Just the one—is that it?’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes.’

  ‘The passage de l’Hirondelle killing a mistake?’

  ‘Giselle le Roy will be found and will pay for it.’

  His cape thrown back, that mustard-yellow scarf worn loose, Delaroche’s free hand was still wrapped tightly about Bob’s lead. Jeannot Raymond’s watchful grey eyes were expressionless, the black overcoat open, the black turtleneck pullover and dark grey pinstripe jacket, black hair and high if furrowed brow not those of a worried man but of one who knew exactly what he had to do and would, no matter what. Much taller than the girl, who was being held tightly from behind, his chin didn’t even touch the top of her blonde head. His reactions would be instinctive, no matter what. That blade would slice deeply as it was drawn from left to right, the girl’s eyes registering shock first, then panic, then loss as life faded. Could nothing be done?

  ‘The Lévitan, Colonel? Is that where you think you’ve got Oona?’

  ‘Salaud, what have you done?’

  ‘And not happy about it, eh?’

  ‘Must I remind you I’m the one with the gun? What went wrong?’

  ‘It being a Sunday, Colonel, the Komandant von Gross-Paris will still be at 26 avenue Raphaël, the villa the Wehrmacht requisitioned for him. Every morning it’s the horseback ride first in the Bois de Boulogne, rain, snow or shine. Then it’s breakfast. Always the café noir avec les croissants chauds and the plum jam, no other, then it’s off to work, but on Sundays, I have to tell you, he stays at that villa a little longer. Sundays are always his bath days. No one is ever allowed to bother him. I hated to interrupt but …’

  There was still no sign of St-Cyr. ‘I’m waiting, Kohler.’

  ‘As is that “partner” of yours?’

  ‘Get on with it, damn you!’

  ‘Mais certainement. Not only was a Wehrmacht guard detail disarmed and their weapons used against them, their uniforms were disgraced. The only possible recourse, since I was under his orders, was to send the perpetrators, minus one, to the villa under arrest and with Lagerfeldwebel Meyer bearing a note from me detailing the reasons. You and that Agence Vidocq of yours are for it, my friend. Bonne chance.’

  Kohler would have done it, as would St-Cyr. ‘Bob, stay. Bob, sit.’

  ‘He’s upset, Colonel. Missing Élène, are you, Bob? Got the scent of the joss she used to burn here?’

  ‘And what of these four?’ asked Delaroche, indicating the boys on Louis’s street, the photograph and its negative.

  Had the son of a bitch thought to barter? ‘They’ve already left town.’

  ‘Using false papers? Really, you do surprise me, Kohler. They’ll be hounded down and brought back. The Höherer SS will be as definite about them as he will be about our showing up at that meeting tomorrow morning with the two of you and Giselle le Roy or Oona Van der Lynn. It won’t much matter which is used, will it?’

  ‘There are meetings and meetings, Colonel, papers and papers, uniforms and uniforms. This Occupier of yours has a thing about all of th
em, hasn’t he? Afraid of what Oberg’s going to do when he finds out what you and that agency have been up to behind his back and those of Von Schaumburg and Gestapo Boemelburg? Terrorizing the streets after dark? Making the Führer gnash his teeth over it? Killing people, raping some of them first and raping others, too? They did, Bob. They really did. That one with the knife held Élène down while this one …’

  ‘Kohler, don’t even bother to try to unsettle Jeannot. Vivienne insisted that we take care of Élène in the manner and place she wished. We did what we had to.’

  Louis … what the hell was keeping Louis? ‘And with Max Auger?’

  ‘The boy had disobeyed me. An example had to be set.’

  ‘And the mistake in the passage de l’Hirondelle? Hobnailed boots again, Colonel? Ach, don’t you French ever throw anything out, especially after all the wars you’ve been in? I couldn’t get rid of mine fast enough. Rage, Colonel, that’s what it suggests to me. Uncontrollable rage, just as with Max and Élène. A very troubled mind that was, and still is, very afraid of what Oberg really will do when he hears about everything you’ve been up to behind his back. The Cercle de l’Union Interaliée and an inner circle who advise you on which targets to use as examples, Hercule the Smasher being one of those advisors? Men who gladly fed you far more names than Denise Rouget or Germaine de Brisac could ever have provided. POW wives and fiancées who needed lessons those bastards then financed.’

  It would do no good to even say it, but … ‘Please try to understand that we’re fighting a war on the home front. Préfet Talbotte is one of that inner circle.’

  ‘Heroes are you, to veterans and others who believe it’s right to punish such women? Then listen hard. You’re a fence sitter and we can prove it. You work for the SS nailing résistants and others they and Von Behr and the ERR want, but at the same time you’ve been covering your ass for later, when the Occupier has to go home. Garnering support from as many as you can while filling vacated residences with the objets d’art and other things of the deported? Cash from double and triple billing the clients, from the sale of wanted names and from contract killings—that’s what Élène was, Bob. Cash you then hide in real estate and probably gold and diamonds, even though it’s illegal for you or anyone else to buy and hold these last. Already you must have built yourself quite a bankroll.’