by Simon Toyne
‘I’m going to take a look at Marie-Claude’s studio at La Broderie,’ he said, heading to the door.
‘I’d go out the back way, if I were you.’
Amand looked through the entrance and saw a couple of news reporters smoking cigarettes and talking on phones. One was studying his dented car bleeding oil on to the cobbles. He needed to call the garage and get it towed and fixed or written off for the insurance, but that all seemed far too mundane, given the day he was having. He turned around and headed to the back door.
Amand emerged into the alley running along the rear of the building, found Marie-Claude’s mobile number, dialled it and listened to her voice asking him to leave a message.
‘It’s Ben. Call me when you get this. I’m worried about you. You need to call me.’
He hung up and glanced over at the Tabac. A few tourists sat under the awning, drinking coffee or glasses of chilled rosé or beer because they were on holiday, so what the hell, but none of the locals had claimed their spots yet and LePoux wasn’t there.
He cut across the cobbled street, sticking to the shade in order to dodge the heat and make it easier to see the screen of his phone. As a town councillor, he had contact numbers for all the other members, including LePoux. He found his home number, dialled it, listened to it ring out then tried his mobile phone next. He rang it three times in case he was ignoring it, before giving up and leaving a message.
‘Michel, this is Amand from the Commissariat. I need to talk to you urgently regarding Madjid Lellouche. Please call me back on this number as soon as you get this message.’
He hung up and scrolled through the other councillors’ names until he found an entry for Jean-Luc Belloq. If LePoux wasn’t in his vineyard or the Tabac, he could usually be found in Belloq’s café. He dialled the number and imagined the bell of the old phone tinkling behind the bar.
A woman answered, her French accented.
‘Is Jean-Luc there?’ Amand asked.
‘No.’
‘What about Michel LePoux, has he been in this morning?’
There was a pause.
‘Mariella, isn’t it?’ Amand said, dragging her name from his memory.
‘Yes.’
‘We met earlier. I’m Ben, from the Cordes Commissariat. Monsieur LePoux isn’t in any kind of trouble, Mariella, and neither is your boss. I just need to get hold of Monsieur LePoux and I thought he might be there. So if you do see him, could you tell him to call me.’
‘He was here,’ Mariella said, in a tiny voice he had trouble hearing. ‘He came in a car to pick Monsieur Belloq up and they drove away. I don’t know where they went.’
‘How long ago was this?’
‘Maybe half an hour.’
Amand nodded. Henri had been trying to get hold of him for longer which meant he was deliberately avoiding them.
‘Thank you, Mariella, you’ve been very helpful.’
He hung up and felt annoyed and hot. He found Belloq’s mobile number, dialled it and listened to it ringing.
‘Come on, you pig, you always have your phone on you,’ he muttered.
It went to voicemail, Belloq’s smooth, smiling voice apologizing for not being available and assuring him his call was important and to please leave a message. Amand didn’t bother. Instead he found LePoux’s number, dialled it again and continued on his way to La Broderie.
38
La Marseillaise mingled with the orchestra of insects in the vines. LePoux looked at the screen and held up his phone for Baptiste to see. ‘It’s your old friend Amand.’
Baptiste spat in the dust. ‘He’s no friend of mine.’
The trumpeting tune played on for a while then fell silent, leaving only the sound of insects and tick of the heat.
Belloq turned to Baptiste. ‘Actually, what the party would like you to do involves Amand to some degree: helping us will also hinder him.’
Baptiste nodded. ‘So much the better.’
‘Josef Engel is dead,’ Belloq said. ‘Murdered, and in such a way as to make it appear that we, or someone sympathetic to our cause, might have done it.’
Baptiste glanced over at LePoux. ‘Did you?’
‘No. But the party did have an interest in Monsieur Engel and his sudden death presents certain problems for us. The leadership believe he had a list of names in his possession: survivors from the camp he had been interred in during the war. We have been asked to find this list, but it appears someone else may have got there first. Josef Engel’s house and workshop had been searched and this morning the home of his granddaughter was also broken into.’
Baptiste looked up.
‘Don’t worry. Marie-Claude was not there and neither was Léo. However they are now both missing, as is a suspect who escaped police custody this morning. They may be together, they may not, but we would like you to find them.’ He picked up the carrier bag and handed it to Baptiste. ‘In there is a laptop with the entire, up-to-date case file on the Engel murder loaded on to it.’
‘How did you get that?’
Belloq smiled. ‘We have friends everywhere. You’d be surprised how much the party has grown since you’ve been away. The person who furnished us with the police file will also keep you updated on every new development, and there are people like him in every Commissariat across the country who will also be feeding you information if you need it. These are all people like us, true Frenchmen, sick of the constant spending cuts and increasing expectations that they keep the peace in a country that is letting them down and being overrun by people who wish to see the end of us and everything we believe in.’
Jean Baptiste pulled the laptop from the carrier and set it on the upturned crate. The screen lit up when he opened it and asked for a password.
‘It’s prodigal,’ Belloq said, ‘all lower-case. It seemed fitting, the prodigal son returning home.’ He smiled and nodded at the barn. ‘You even slaughtered a fatted beast.’
Baptiste tapped prodigal into the box and the laptop unlocked. He clicked open the single folder on the desktop and scanned the large directory of files inside: witness statements, crime scene photographs, everything.
‘There’s also a smartphone in the bag, so you can connect to the internet wherever you are, and a set of clothes back in the car in a travelling case with everything else you might need. We realize this might take some time. There’s something else for you in the carrier bag.’
Baptiste reached inside and pulled out a small biscuit tin about the same size as a hardback book. He shook it gently and something heavy shifted inside.
‘Our man in the Commissariat managed to secure it and keep hold of it for you after you were … dismissed. He was hoping to give it to you in person, and a great deal sooner than this. Anyway, there it is for you now. You may find it useful.’
Baptiste prised open the lid and lifted out something loosely wrapped in oil-stained newspaper dated four years earlier. Underneath was his old police ID card, the photograph showing a much younger, clean-shaven, unhardened version of himself. He unwrapped the newspaper and stared down at his old service weapon, an SP 2022 semi-automatic, the matt black polymer surface dulled with age.
‘I brought you some ammunition,’ LePoux said, gazing at the gun the way an addict stares at drugs, ‘also some gun oil and some cloths to clean it. They’re in the car.’
‘You know what kind of trouble I’ll get in if I’m discovered with a concealed weapon?’
Belloq shrugged. ‘Then don’t get caught. Or don’t take it with you, though I think we can assume that whoever killed Josef Engel might also be looking for Marie-Claude, if they haven’t found her already. And if they find her, they will also find Léo.’
Baptiste closed his fingers round the grip, his trigger finger curling into the firing position. It felt comfortable and familiar and made him feel something else he had not experienced for a long while. It made him feel powerful.
‘You know she’s bringing your son up as a Jew,’ Belloq said,
his voice low like he was sharing something shameful. ‘She takes him to the synagogue in Toulouse and he’s been seen wearing a little Jew cap on Fridays. Is that what you want for him? You want to let his mother ruin him, or do you want to take your son back and raise him right?’
‘I never knew she was a Jew when I married her.’
‘I know. She tricked you. She tricked us all. But that’s what they do. They’re like the disease in these vines: do nothing and the rot will spread and the vine will die. But catch it early and cut it out and the vine survives. Tell me, did you ever dream, while you were marking off all those months and years in prison, that you might one day get your son back?’ Baptiste turned the gun over in his hand and shook his head. ‘Of course you didn’t. How could you, with your prison record and a conviction against his mother hanging over your head. But this is your chance, your only chance maybe.’
Baptiste placed the gun on the crate next to the wet circle where Belloq’s beer bottle had stood and took his ID card from the tin. ‘I’ll need a car and some money. And I want to see Marie-Claude’s house.’
Belloq pointed at the laptop. ‘I’m sure there some pictures on—’
‘Not pictures. I need to see for myself. To start a hunt, you need a good scent of the prey, then you follow whatever tracks have been left behind. There are always tracks. Get me into the house. I’ll find them.’
39
Amand stepped through the open front door of La Broderie and headed to the stairs, listening to the morning hum of activity in the building. He’d been here before, after Marie-Claude first got her grant from the Shoah Foundation and sublet the tiny office from a web-design company moving to a bigger unit. He’d hauled a desk, a chair and a computer up to the small office for her but not been back since. He’d asked her about her work but she’d always been evasive and he hadn’t wanted to pry. He knew she spent a lot of time here because her car was always parked outside, but he wasn’t prepared for what lay beyond the door to Marie-Claude’s office.
He stood in the doorway for a moment, staring into the gloom. The desk and the computer were exactly where he’d put them, but the desk was now swamped with paper and books and a printer/scanner lay half-buried in paperwork. But it was the walls that made him stare. The last time he’d seen them they were blank and unremarkable, now they teemed with tiny writing. Names, hundreds of names, thousands even. Many had been crossed out but some had red threads of cotton connecting them to a piece of A4 paper pinned to the centre of the wall beneath a photocopied page from a book.
He moved into the room and studied the photocopied page, a handwritten note in the margin identifying that it was: From the diary of Private John Hamilton, liberator of Mulhouse A.
The photocopied text was faded and hard to read in the gloom. Amand crossed to the window, opened the shutters to flood the office in sunlight and turned back to read the entry:
There were thirty-four men inside that cellar, locked up and left to die by someone whose evil I cannot begin to fathom. Maybe the explosions that had part-demolished the buildings had been deliberately set to collapse the cellar on top of them, murdering and burying them at the same time. If so, they had failed. But only just. Thirty-four men had been buried in that cellar and only twelve of them were still alive. A day later, despite the best emergency medical care we could give them, there were four.
Four men out of thirty-four and God knows how many countless thousands before them. These were the men who came to be known as Die Anderen – The Others.
Amand studied the sheet of A4 next.
The red cotton threads all converged on two empty spaces at the bottom of the page. Marie-Claude had been looking for the survivors.
Amand took out his phone, snapped a photograph of both pages then opened a Notebook app and started methodically working his way round the room, following each red thread to an individual name before carefully noting it down. When he’d finished, he counted them. There were fifty-eight. Fifty-eight names from a list of thousands. He looked at the list again. He had known Josef had been a prisoner during the war, that had all come out around Baptiste’s trial, but he had never known exactly where.
He sat at the desk and switched on the computer, glancing through the stacks of paperwork while he waited for the hard drive to boot up. An open pack of memory sticks lay next to a pile of envelopes with La Broderie’s address written on them, stamped and ready to be sent out. A smaller pile of returned envelopes lay next to them, their tops ripped open and correspondence visible inside. Amand picked one up and read it:
Dear Mme Engel,
Thank you for your letter regarding my late grandfather Thomasz Edelmann. Unfortunately, I cannot help you in your enquiries regarding Die Schneider Lager except to say that we believe my grandfather died in Bergen-Belsen after being transferred out of Mulhouse A towards the end of the war.
I wish you well in your continued research and applaud your efforts in commemorating this chapter of history that, sadly, many now seem happier to forget.
Sincerely Yours,
Erik Edelmann
Amand put the letter back in the envelope and turned his attention to the piles of paperwork. They were made up of printouts of PDF files, screen-grabs from various archived web pages, and page after page of the same kind of neat columns of handwritten names that covered the walls around him. There were copies of death certificates too, Nazi transport and prisoner manifests with swastikas stamped across them, ghetto census lists from both Łodź and Warsaw, and several bundles of paperwork relating specifically to Mulhouse A. Hundreds of thousands of names, many of which had been crossed out in various coloured pens.
Amand marvelled at the amount of time it must have taken Marie-Claude to not only track down all this information but also meticulously sort through it all. He wondered why she hadn’t just asked Josef for the names, but realized she must have done. Josef had always been something of a spiky individual, cold and withdrawn, and relations between him and Marie-Claude had been difficult. Maybe this explained why.
The computer finished booting up and a password box flashed up. He typed in marieclaude. The screen shook and ‘Incorrect Password’ appeared. He tried capitalizing it, then tried Léonardo and Léo, upper and lower case, but they all came back incorrect and a new message popped up telling him he had one more attempt before the computer locked itself for thirty minutes.
Amand stared at the flashing cursor, trying to think like Marie-Claude, searching for a word that would be significant enough to use as a password. He thought of one but hesitated to type it, half hoping he was wrong but also keen to unlock the computer and discover what it contained. He left the Caps Lock on, typed ‘BAPTISTE’ and hit Return. The screen shuddered and locked him out and a timer popped up starting a thirty-minute countdown.
He sat back in his chair, and blew out a long breath of relief. It was worth waiting half an hour to know Marie-Claude had not used her ex-husband’s name to keep her documents safe.
He turned his attention to another pile of paperwork, more lists of names, more crossings out, but at the bottom, standing like a foundation for the whole enterprise were two books, each with numerous yellow Post-its bursting out of the pages. Amand picked up the first and read the title:
Freeing the Dead: The Nazi Death Camp Liberators
He turned to the first page marked with a Post-it and read the chapter heading: ‘Extract from the Diary of Private John Hamilton, 2nd Royal Wessex Infantry, on the Liberation of Nazi Labour Camp Mulhouse A – known as Die Schneider Lager’.
It was the book the photocopied page had come from. The full entry was ten pages long and marked with numerous Post-its. Amand flicked through it then picked up the second volume:
Dark Material – The Devil’s Tailor: Death and Life in Die Schneider Lager by Herman Lansky
Lansky’s name was on Marie-Claude’s list. Amand glanced at the timer on the computer screen. Twenty-five minutes left to wait before he could try another pa
ssword. Maybe he would find something in these books that would give him a clue as to what that password might be. He leaned back in the chair, turned away from the window slightly so the sunlight fell on the pages, and started to read.
VI
‘Who by water and who by fire?’
From the ‘Unetanneh Tokef’,
traditional Jewish prayer
Extract from
DARK MATERIAL – THE DEVIL’S TAILOR: DEATH AND LIFE IN DIE SCHNEIDER LAGER
By Herman Lansky
It is impossible to know where to start when chronicling the heinous crimes of Standartenführer Artur Samler. Whenever I think of Nazis now I see only him, as if all the darkness and evil of the Third Reich has crystallized into this one person. He was all of the things you would imagine a Nazi camp commandant to be – cruel, brutal, sadistic – but there was also something stylish and civilized about him, which made him seem all the more inhuman. Even when beating people to death with the swagger stick he always carried he remained placid and calm.
He used to walk around the camp like a king, stick under one arm and his other hand resting on the silver eagle’s head handle of the ceremonial bayonet he always wore on his belt like a sword. I saw him behead a prisoner with it once for accidentally splashing mud on his uniform, but mostly he used it to disfigure people: castrations; slicing the breasts off women; cutting the Star of David into people’s flesh, hacking away their humanity piece by piece while the guards held them down. And all of these things he did with the same quiet, detached calm, like he was simply cutting down weeds on an evening walk.
The only time I ever saw Samler show any form of human emotion was when his dog Brutus died. A group of us were ordered to construct a tomb for him in Samler’s garden, and I was part of the burial detail. We hid in the bushes to spare the ceremony our wretched presence and appearance, but I saw Samler weeping as he carried his dog into the tomb in a specially made cherrywood coffin. All those people dead with nothing to remember them by and that dog got a marble shrine and fresh flowers every week. Samler loved his dogs more than people. I know it to be true.