The once dark blue Terrot bicycle was caked with dirt and badly scratched, its mudguards dented, the glass of its blue-blinkered lamp cracked. A torn bit of towelling padded the seat. Wires secured the tyres to their rims – a bike no one would want to steal or requisition, but it was the load she had brought that begged closer scrutiny. The front carrier basket held a large, worn brown leather suitcase, tied round with old rope; on the rear carrier rack there was a wooden cage that held two worried rabbits beneath an oft-mended burlap sack that bulged.
Above the hiking boots, coarse grey woollen socks hid the turn-ups of the heavy khaki trousers she had made over for herself. Originally from quartermasters’ stores, the trousers had been left on the beaches at Dunkirk in early June of 1940 like thousands of other pairs, boots, shirts, et cetera, as the Allies had fled to Britain. Such garments had been rarely worn at first, but now in the third winter of the Occupation, were increasingly being seen, and with the defeat at Stalingrad, would be even more in demand.
The girl’s breath came hesitantly, as she sensed that things were not right but couldn’t put her finger on the cause. The police photographer had been and gone, the corpse would be in the morgue, yet not one of the neighbours had thought to stop her in the street to tell her. Not one.
Cautiously she wheeled the bike towards the honey-house. Noting the footprints of others trampled in the snow, she held her breath, looked questioningly over a shoulder towards the house – searched its windows on the first floor, one in particular. That of the brother, he thought. Then she looked towards the gate in the wall at the back of the garden.
A girl of eighteen, with pale, silky auburn hair that didn’t quite reach her shoulders. The large, wary eyes were gaunt and darkly shadowed by fatigue under finely curving brows. The forehead was furrowed with anxiety and chalky, the nose that of the father, although in her it made the face appear narrower than it was, giving height to the brow but a fine, soft curve to the chin. The lips, unreddened by anything but the cold, and slightly parted in apprehension, were not thin like the father’s, but more those of the mother. Good kissing lips, Hermann would have said. The cheeks, though rosy, were frost-bitten under that same chalky whiteness as the brow. Was she ill?
When she opened the door to the honey-house and saw him waiting for her, Danielle sucked in a breath and blanched.
Quivering, she waited for him to … to arrest her? wondered St-Cyr and sighed inwardly as he told her who he was.
Alarm filled her grey eyes. Faintly she found her voice. ‘What … what has happened? The Sûreté …?’ she managed.
Not the flics, not the Gestapo either, or the Milice. Although it would be best to put the jump on her and find out what he could, he told himself he would have to be kind. ‘An accident, I think.’
‘An accident,’ she repeated.
‘Your father, mademoiselle. I regret the news I must impart, but …’
‘Dead?’ she asked emptily. ‘Dead?’
‘Please go into the house, mademoiselle. Take as long as you need. A few questions, nothing difficult …’
‘An accident, you said.’
‘Well, perhaps it was attempted murder.’
‘She did it. He always said she would. Maman!’ she cried in anguish and began to run towards the house only to be caught by an arm and pulled back.
Vehemently shaking her head, she stammered, ‘I … I shouldn’t have said that. I … I told him she would never do it. Never, do you understand? Maman only threatened to because she … she was so unhappy. Murder was never in either of their hearts, Inspector. How could it have been?’ ‘
The urge to say, That is what we must determine, was suppressed. St-Cyr released his hold on her, the girl instantly dropping her eyes and pressing a fist hard against her lips to stop herself from crying.
Turning away, she began to pluck at the ropes that bound the cage and sack to her carrier. Breaking a fingernail, she tore off the offending shred with her teeth. ‘Bacon …’ she wept. ‘Some sausage … The last of the late pears, wrapped in newspaper … Butter. I managed a kilo this time. Cheese, too, and eggs – enough for an omelette.’
Taking her by the shoulders, St-Cyr stood behind her saying, ‘Cry, mademoiselle. Go on, please. You’re exhausted and now in shock and deeply distressed. Things will sort themselves out in time. Leave the unloading and the rabbits to me. They’re to go under the kitchen stove, isn’t that so?’ he asked and saw her nod.
‘The cage there is bigger. I … I made it for them. He … he really would have been pleased. I know he would.’
It was a cry of despair.
Turning from her, he began to untie the ropes that bound the suitcase to her front carrier. Danielle knew he would open it – that he’d see both what she’d brought back and what she hadn’t been able to barter or had hung on to by never giving in and always sticking to her price.
She knew he’d see her for what she had become – a travelling stall-keeper, a peddlar – and that the crucible of her very being was in those things, and that the bike was not nearly so beat-up as it appeared. The sack bulged where those of others did not; the rabbits were not two males as others often discovered, but a buck and a doe whose mating had been performed before her as proof positive and at her insistence.
But would he find in that stained and slag-encrusted crucible, the button of gold at the bottom of its white-hot melt?
‘Excuse me, then, Inspector. I … I’m not myself, I’m afraid. Papa … papa and I, we were the best of friends. I understood him, you see. I alone appreciated what he did and what he had worked so hard to become.’
St-Cyr watched and, as he had felt she would, the girl turned to look back at the honey-house before entering the study to pick her way through it and wonder what really had happened there.
A little thread, some buttons on cards, a few safety pins and hairpins met his eyes as he opened the suitcase. Carpenter’s nails were like gold and she had them in several sizes and neat little bundles, and had hung on to them in the hope of a better deal. Shoelaces, string, glue – what else had she carried in trade?
Unlike most, she hadn’t taken small valuables from the house but had built up a stock of necessities and simple luxuries. Toothbrushes were extremely rare and she had them, elastic bands, too. Hairbrushes, hair-combs, pencils, playing cards, dice, lipsticks, cigarette lighters, small tins of black-market lighter fuel but watch out, it’s gasoline!
Matches, too, but from the Reich, not French. Cigarettes – Russian, these. Pipe tobacco – Dutch. How had she come by it?
Chocolate – real chocolate!
Balls of wool – blue-grey, black and white – recovered from unravelled sweaters. Some reasonably good perfume, face powder and compacts. Tins of tuna fish. A christening dress for a baby, a bonnet, too. Three brassieres and several pairs of underwear, both male and female, not new, of course, but well laundered and with, yes, that same clean, white sand …
Jammed into the suitcase were the spoils of bartering: a small sack of chicken manure to be mixed with wood ash if possible, and used to fertilize the soil under the forty or so inverted glass bell jars, the cloches beneath which the girl would soon start growing Belgian endive, green onions, radishes, lettuces, et cetera, in the garden.
The smoked pork sausage with garlic, smelled also of savory and mushrooms. Six chicken eggs were cradled in a cigar box that was lined with straw and secured by elastic bands. The bacon, a slab of about two kilograms, was wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. There was a small crock of pate. Two jars of redcurrant jelly were nestled beside others of plum jam. Dried cherries and dried apples filled a small tin box. There was also a rope of garlic.
The sack held beets, but among them were potatoes, carrots and a stalk of Brussels sprouts.
Among the tins of face powder she had to offer was one whose shade would easily have matched the pallor he’d seen and he realized then that here was a very resourceful young woman. At each control she would have co
ughed, looked like death, and gasped, ‘A fever. The flu, I think, Herr Offizier. Forgive me.’
‘Pass. Let this one pass.’
Not only would it have discouraged a close inspection but also flirtation. And yes, the road controls were normally run by the Wehrmacht, not the Gestapo, not the flics, the Milice and other Vichy goons as at the railway stations. But how had she come by so many things to trade, and where the hell was Hermann? Surely he should have been here with the car by now?
There wasn’t just one man in the Bahnschutzpolizei office at the Gare de l’Est, a hole in the wall with stove, table and chairs. There were three of them, and the contents of the woman’s purse was still strewn across the table, so they weren’t yet finished with her, thought Kohler. Ah damn …
Putting his back to the door, he took in the competition. The Bzp Obergruppenfuhrer who had watched the other two at play, didn’t smile. A climber who would have liked to have worn a different uniform, the man was about forty years of age, clean-shaven and serious.
‘So, mein Herr, you have a problem?’ asked the Bzp in deutsch – in German. ‘The woman is suspected of being a courier for the terrorists.’
Black tunics and flies were undone on the other two, not on this one. He even wore his cap.
‘Several times we have noticed her,’ eagerly sang out an eighteen-year-old boy in French, the younger of the two miliciens. ‘When I was with the Service d’Ordre, she would come and go twice a week. I watched her.’
‘Always she has those kids with her as a distraction,’ grunted the older milicien, grim-faced and smug about doing his ‘duty’. Both wore the regulation-issue brown shirts, black ties and trousers. Her suitcases had been emptied into a corner, but they’d not had time yet to pick through the loot – winter beans, dried and still in their pods, potatoes …
‘You raped her,’ sighed Kohler in French. ‘Under OKW ordinance eighty-four, section thirty-six, article seven – that’s Oberkommando der Wehrmacht to you two – what you’ve just done is a criminal offence and subject to the death penalty. Look, I’m sorry but I’m going to have to report it.’
‘To whom?’ asked the Obergruppenführer softly.
‘To the Kommandant von Gross-Paris. How’s that for an answer?’
Herr Kohler’s German was still perfect, of course, but his French had really been very good and far better than most. ‘I wouldn’t if I were you.’
Deutsch again. ‘And why not?’
‘Word gets around. Besides …’ The Obergruppenführer thumbed her identity card. ‘This, I believe, is a forgery.’
What else was the bastard to have said? scoffed Kohler silently as the other two quickly buttoned themselves. The boy found his chasseur alpin beret and truncheon, the older one, his cigarettes and those of the woman, her lipstick, too.
Was there nothing for it, then? asked Kohler silently. Louis wasn’t here to back him up. Louis wasn’t anywhere near. Had she been arrested by the Gestapo or the SS, things would have been far harsher and still would be. Yet if a courier, then wasn’t the item these bastards wanted not on her person at all, but being passed from child to child out there on that bench!
‘Look, I can’t have trouble. Not at the moment. My partner and I are on to something really big and need a little help.’
‘So, are we to let the whore go in return? Is this what you’re saying?’ asked the sergeant, finding the thought mildly amusing.
Neither of the other two could comprehend a word, so gut, ja gut, thought Kohler. ‘That’s it. Old Shatter Hand wants me to have a look at …’ He found his little black notebook and flipped it open to any page. ‘Shed fourteen, line twenty. Help me out and I’ll put in a good word for you and forget all about what happened here.’
Kohler … Kripo, Paris-Central … where had he heard that name before? wondered Obergruppenführer Karl Otto Denke. The rue des Saussaises, he told himself, and something about the SS. A rawhide whip and their not liking this one. The scar on the left cheek – yes, yes that was it, so he could go to them if Kohler should reveal anything useful. ‘Okay, you’ve got a deal. Let her go, you two. Vite, vite. Orders from above. Orders, idiots!’ He swept an arm across the table and, dumping the contents of the purse back into it, handed the bag to the boy.
Kohler took it from him. ‘The cigarettes and the lipstick,’ he asked the older milicien in French and snapped his fingers. ‘Just to calm her nerves, eh? Then maybe if she really is working for the terrorists, those salauds won’t come looking for you.’
Unable to comprehend all that had been said, suspicion registered in the Bzp’s countenance; doubt and fear were in those of the other two.
‘So, okay, we’ve got ourselves a deal,’ quipped Kohler, ‘and the three of us will visit the shed.’
Out on the concourse, he told the corporal to make certain the suitcases were refilled. ‘We wouldn’t want her going home empty-handed, especially since her papers are in perfect order.’
She would change them within the hour. She had that look about her. One after another the storybooks were closed and the staircase of kids got to their feet to dutifully wait.
‘Take care of her,’ he said to the littlest one. Nothing else. Just that.
Madame de Bonnevies was in the kitchen, sipping the leftover of the daughter’s tisane of linden blossom, perhaps sweetened with honey. She didn’t look up when St-Cyr put the last of the things the girl had brought on the counter, but when he shook the matchbox the husband had used to hold its little corpses, the woman set the bowl down.
‘Acarine mites in Caucasian bees,’ he said. ‘An address entitled, “Will no one speak for the bees of Russia?”‘
‘Danielle can perhaps help you, Inspector, but you will have to wait.’
‘Murder seldom does.’
‘Merde alors, I’ve already told you I know nothing of these. The child is exhausted. Have you no compassion? No thought for the worry she has caused her mother?’
The Inspector wasn’t buying it. He set the matchbox down on the table in front of her and found his pipe and tobacco pouch.
‘Your husband was freshly shaven, madame, and had dressed as if for an evening out.’
‘I … I don’t know what he was up to. Believe me, I wouldn’t have. Danielle … Danielle is the only one who might be able to tell you.’
‘The girl stayed at the family’s country house?’
She met his gaze, asked herself, What the hell has Danielle already told him? and said with a shrug, ‘It’s near Soisy-sur-Seine. She … she goes there sometimes – it’s on one of her “routes”, but she tries not to visit it too much. That way it’s … it’s safer.’
‘And unoccupied otherwise?’ he asked and heard her acidly answer, ‘Of course. Fortunately the Occupier has found no need of it.’ But then she calmed herself.
‘My father loved it, Inspector. Danielle never really knew him but feels the same and I know she … she would like to live there, too.’
‘As your father did, madame, or as your son, before the war?’
Ah damn him. ‘My son, yes. My father left the property to him.’ There, he could make of that what he wanted!
The table, one of those exquisite pieces from the provinces, had the warmth of old pine boards that always seem to ask, How many have sat here in days gone by? Bare but for a decorative bowl which would, before the Defeat, have held fruit, it would have easily seated eight or ten.
And this one has realized I love the table, she warned herself as he sat down to examine the beets in the bowl.
‘The names in this directory, madame. If we could just run through them.’
‘It’s … it’s been a long time, as I’ve already told you.’
‘Of course, but …’
He paused to light that pipe of his and to look steadily at her until he had forced her to bleat, ‘But what, Inspector?’
‘One name, that’s all my partner and I need. Enough to make a good start and save much time.’
Again he forced her to wait. Taking out his little black notebook, the Inspector struggled to find a pencil stub and at last rescued one from his jacket pocket.
Alexandre’s signet ring was among the debris that had come out of that pocket – he would have had to remove it from the corpse. Why had he done so? Why had he left it on the table like that?
Elastic bands were also there, burnt-out matchsticks, a cigarette butt that had dribbled its tobacco on the table, the mégot tin it was to have gone into, a tin that was years old and had once held sweets: Anis de l’Abbaye de Flavigny …
‘Does the name Frau Uma Schlacht ring any bells, madame?’
‘Schlacht?’ she heard herself saying.
‘Age: forty-four. Address: 28 quai d’Orléans. She’s not one of the Blitzmädels, not with a schedule that allows for visits during the day.’
The Île Saint-Louis, and not one of the grey mice, the girls who had come in their droves from the Reich as telegraphists, typists, clerks, cooks, canteen help and other jobs like prison warders and interrogators.
‘“Treatments: Mondays,” madame, “at four p.m.” What sort of treatments?’
‘How the hell am I supposed to know?’
‘Would your daughter have carried out those treatments?’
‘Instead of my husband?’
The woman was shaking, and as he watched her, more tears fell. ‘You know that’s what I mean, madame.’
‘Then, no! Alexandre would have insisted on attending to this … this foreigner himself.’
‘Then did your daughter help him with other patients, other clients?’
She would toss an uncaring hand and shrug, thought Juliette, would say acidly, ‘Ask her, don’t ask me. Mon Dieu, those two had shut me right out of their lives. We … we hardly spoke.’
There, he’d make what he wanted of that, too, she told herself. A son who had left the house at the age of sixteen and now a daughter who had loved her father, not her mother because she hadn’t wanted her to be born.
‘“Two litres of mead a month, madame. Six hundred grams of pollen – apple or rose if possible. Honey in two 400CC jars.” Again Frau Schlacht prefers the apple or rose. “For facial masks and for the throat.” Is she a singer?’
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