There would be no sense in trying to bribe Kohler. ‘Tell St-Cyr to join us.’
‘Not until you tell me what makes a man like that one tick.’
‘Jeannot? He discovered that the woman he adored and would have done anything for had betrayed him not once but several times.’
‘And you, Colonel? Did you discover what he’d done and then get him to work for you?’
‘Jeannot and myself are equal partners, fellow members, yes, of the Interaliée, which is where I first met him. This Occupation affords so many opportunities and now, of course, the Argentina he came to love and want to help to build is on the best of terms with the Reich******** and has agreed that, again, he can be accepted as a citizen, especially as he has sufficient capital to buy back and enlarge his ranches.’
‘Travel by submarine?’
‘Perhaps. Now tell St-Cyr to stop whatever he thinks he’s doing and join us.’
‘Me? You still haven’t got it, have you? Louis is the one who usually does all this wrap-up stuff and has a mind of his own.’
Would the cartridges be damp and useless? wondered St-Cyr. Would Jeannot Raymond’s reactions be too swift even then? Would the colonel shoot Hermann?
There was only one way of finding out. He looked at the Lebel in his hand, but to say to it, Don’t fail me again, seemed senseless. Hermann would still have wanted him to try. If not successful, at least he’d know that this partner and friend of his had made the attempt.
All the matches in the packet he’d brought from the car would be needed—merde, they were so hard to get. The black powder from two of the cartridges Hermann had okayed, but should have bitten first and wiggled, was added, as were paper token offerings whose loss the dead would not object to and joss sticks, the shoes and socks left to one side. Bare feet would be best. The rosewood planks in the floor had been lovingly honed and polished so that they glistened.
The four-legged turtle urn he had chosen was large enough to contain the fire and not burn the temple down. The matches flared, the powder took, the paper strips igniting as the joss began at once to burn.
Incense billowed up to be caught by the latest gust and carried to them, but would they be distracted by it, Hermann intuitively realizing what his partner was up to and becoming a part of it?
‘Bob, there’s my soldier,’ sang out Kohler. ‘He’s really missing Élène, Colonel. These what you’re after in my jacket pocket, Bob? The white, lace-trimmed pongee step-ins I used when I found her wedding ring?’
Eagerly Bob tugged at the briefs, pulling Delaroche off-balance. Joss smoke was everywhere …
Smashed in the forehead, the shot reverberating, Jeannot Raymond released his grip on the knife as he fell. ‘COLONEL, DON’T!’ yelled Louis.
Hermann leaped. The pistol was grabbed, wrenched away, Delaroche hit and hit hard with it until he, too, dropped, Bob looking puzzled now, the briefs dangling from his mouth, Suzette Dunand trying to steady herself.
‘Ah, bon,’ said Louis with a sigh. ‘It’s over, Hermann.’
‘Delaroche won’t sing and you know it.’
‘But will be asked to.’
‘Though not by us.’
* * *
Up through the woods, the sounds from the industrial suburb of Suresnes came to mark an end to the day. Wet through and cold, pneumonia was bound to set in. Louis handed him the cognac bottle. ‘It’s safe,’ he said, having downed a goodly measure and found no nicotine. How could he have been so sure?
‘I wasn’t,’ he confessed. ‘I just assumed it since the cork had been bunged home and leaded sixty-seven years ago.’
Below them, prudence had demanded that they leave the Citroën tucked in against the base of an oak that, for some reason, hadn’t been logged, burned or sawn up for lumber in 1871. ‘The Prussians must have felt they needed its shade,’ Louis had mused. Those people had found the fort up there on Mont-Valérien empty. In that distant war, they hadn’t even had to shell that dismal pentagon of buttressed grey stonework at the end of this rutted, boulder-strewn lane. On 29 January of that year they had marched in without a shot having been fired, the strongest of the seventeen such forts in the defence of Paris.
And now? Kohler had to ask and answer, Why now they’re back in it again.
‘Sixty-nine-and-a-half years later,’ said Louis drolly, having calculated it to the Defeat of June 1940. ‘He won’t wait for us, Hermann.’
It was still Sunday 14 February 1943 and they’d been run off their feet. Giselle had remembered Louis’s singing the praises of his friends on place Vendôme and their shop, Enchantment, and had managed to reach it. Taken in by Muriel Barteaux, of Mirage perfume fame, and Chantal Grenier, her partner, both well into their seventies and lifelong companions, she’d been ‘assessed. Complètement nue, my Hermann,’ and now was one of their lingerie mannequins. Good goods, very high class. ‘Another profession,’ she had said and given him a peck on the cheek. ‘Safer, too, I think, than keeping house for one who doesn’t need a housekeeper.’
As if she had ever done that. And Oona? he asked. Oona had found Adrienne Guillaumet, who had been moved to another floor in the Hôtel-Dieu. She’d gone to tell Henri and Louisette that their dear maman would soon be rejoining them and that, for a little, she would need some help.
Oona would stay with her in the flat on the rue Saint-Dominique. A shy and hesitant touch on the arm, that’s all he’d been able to give her, she the same with him. A lingering last look? he wondered.
The boys had got safely away and would work on their respective farms until after the autumn harvest at least. The street would be lonely for Louis but then, he was hardly ever home and not likely to be in the near future.
They continued on up the hill. At least the rain had quit.
‘You forgot something, Hermann. The Ritz.’
And right next door to the shop Enchantment. Adrienne Guillaumet hadn’t been about to sell the use of her self but rather the Biedermeier furniture her husband treasured. They had negotiated the sale to the General Schiller from Baden-Baden. At least it wouldn’t be stolen, and she’d got a fair price, Reichskassenscheine, too, all of fifty thousand of them, a million francs. She would divorce the husband if the courts would let her, would leave him in any case and never wanted to see him again, was thinking of Spain and the Costa del Sol, of a seaside lodging house perhaps, but only because Oona had suggested it. Deauville had been an alternate, though for later, when this Occupation was over.
‘And Marie-Léon Barrault?’ asked Louis.
‘Innocent too.’ It had all been lies and they’d made damned sure the Scapini Commission in Berlin learned of it, since they’d had that sour little priest, Father Marescot of the Notre-Dame de Lorette, write the letter.
When Gaston Morel had told her to take the lift in the Hôtel Grand, and she’d been photographed doing so, she had gone up to the fourth floor, to a room where one of the Bonzen dabbled on the side in the black market and had aspirins, cough syrup and other medicines for sale. Good stuff, too. Things one could trust, Annette having had a bad cold at the time, a temperature, and the only occasion in which her mother had accepted money from Morel. And as for the manager of the Cinéma Impérial trying to get her to have sex with him, one word had been enough, and the muzzle of Louis’s Lebel.
Suzette Dunand they had safely seen on to her train. She might be home by now and would have lots to say when she got there.
‘Which leaves only us, Hermann.’
It didn’t, not quite, but no matter. ‘My boots are leaking again.’
‘You’ll think of something.’
Together they entered the fort within whose cells, it having been built between 1830 and 1848 during the reign of Louis Philippe, languished résistants and others Judge Hercule Rouget had condemned to death but not this late-afternoon’s quota.
The posts were occupied, the blindfolds in place, the volley harsh-sounding on the damp air but brief.
Tall, rheu
my-eyed, ramrod stiff in greatcoat and cap, an Iron Cross First Class at the throat, Von Schaumburg had but a few words for them. ‘Your witnessing this won’t look good for either of you, Kohler, but understand that is precisely why I’ve summoned you.’
Maybe 1,500 had been executed so far, maybe more in this most feared of places and buried in its surrounding woods. The Résistance would, of course, be bound to get the wrong message and think this partnership had been present at any number of executions; the Occupier, its SS and Gestapo particularly, would know this wasn’t so, but think the worst of them in any case.
Oberg wasn’t happy and neither was Boemelburg but then, neither were often happy. The Standartenführer Langbehn had been recalled. Sonja Remer hadn’t been able to do what she had most wanted but wouldn’t be leaving the avenue Foch in the near future, so would always be on hand should Oberg take another notion to get rid of them.
Gabrielle was fine, or so it appeared. Safe for the moment, but there’d been no time for her and Louis to spend together.
The bodies were being freed, the blindfolds and ropes to be used again and again, the colonel’s first and then those of the one who had attacked Adrienne Guillaumet so savagely and then had hustled to the passage Jouffroy to rob the stamp shop with the other sous-chef, who now lay beside him.
‘There’s no need for either of you to sign the death notices,’ said Von Schaumburg. ‘My office, and it alone, will take care of that.’
Garnier and Quevillon had also been executed, Berlin pacified. Gradually the streets would return to relative safety. Vivienne Rouget had committed a crime of passion and would never see the inside of a cell or face the breadbasket. Hercule the Smasher was just too valuable to the Occupier, as were those of the Interaliée who had backed the Agence Vidocq. Louis and he would just have to leave it.
‘Until spring comes, Hermann,’ he muttered.
‘Walk with me to my car,’ said Von Schaumburg, ignoring the muted outburst. ‘I’ve something for you.’
Their train would leave at 2000 hours. Vittel was in the Vosges and still in the grip of winter.
‘The Kommandant went to school with me, Kohler. Give him my regards.’
Ach, another Prussian of the old school!
‘And the problem?’ hazarded Louis.
‘Something about a ringer of bells who ought to know, or have known, better. The line wasn’t clear.’
Only when they reached the Citroën did Hermann say, ‘Bellringer, Louis. It has a good ring to it.’
‘Idiot, we’re to get the hell out of Paris and you know it. Wasn’t Talbotte a member of that inner circle?’
A last look uphill was just that, the Kommandant von Gross-Paris’s car heading straight for them as they stepped aside.
‘I’ll drive, Louis. It’s better for you if I’m seen to.’
They got in, were crowded, greeted and licked as if they’d been absent for an eternity. ‘Pour l’amour de Dieu, Hermann, get that animal away from me!’
‘He’s lonely. You’ll get use to him. He’s good for the image.’
‘Ours is tarnished enough!’
Bob was persistent; Bob needed his friends. Finally Louis settled back in defeat to place a hand on Bob’s head, which had somehow found its way into his lap.
‘Do you think the backseat would be better for the two of you?’ offered Kohler. There was no answer. ‘Bellringer, Louis. It must have something to do with a monk or priest, or novice or one or the other. Bob’s going to love it. He’ll feel right at home. It’ll be good for him.’
Hermann always had to have the last word. In a way, the Occupier in him demanded it but some philosophical thing at least should be said just to put him off stride and make him think.
A sigh would be best, and then, ‘There are no endings, Hermann, only beginnings.’
Notes
* a vehicle powered by wood- or charcoal-gas
** The Internationale Kriminalpolizeiliche Kommission, the forerunner of Interpol.
*** the Security Service of the SS and Nazi Party
**** There are now well over 100,000 graves.
***** Antoine de St-Exupéry’s employer in Vol de Nuit (Night Flight) 1931
****** Destroyed by fire in 1984, the dinh was from what is now South Vietnam.
******* The Toronto Globe and Mail of 4 May 2003 reported that the millionth had been served. Unfortunately Göring’s numbers weren’t listed in the article, nor were those of any other of the Occupier.
******** On 24 August 1944, at the close of the Occupation, some of these were used, causing considerable damage to the Château and adjacent buildings.
******** this was still possible but eventually under U.S. pressure, Argentina broke off relations with the Third Reich on 26 January 1944
THE ST-CYR AND KOHLER SERIES
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