It was Barbie’s turn to say Good and he did it in such a clipped manner, she was startled and confused but only for a split second.
Then recognition, perhaps, entered her pretty head. She smiled knowingly and said again, with eagerness this time, ‘Yes … yes, I will be there. Is Johann to be in charge of security?’
He was. This pleased her so much she got up quickly and went over to Barbie and out of sight, ah damn.
‘A small fire is quite possible,’ he said, ‘but we will make certain there will be no panic except in those areas where we might want it.’
merde!
‘Shall I inform my husband of this?’ she asked, the schoolgirl again.
‘No. No, it would be best to leave it between ourselves.’
This time she must have reached out to take him eagerly by the hand, for she gushed, ‘I’m so grateful, Herr Obersturmführer.’
His heels crashed together in the little bow a bastard like that would give. ‘Then consider it my Christmas present to you, Frau Weidling. Heil Hitler.’
She stopped him at the door. ‘Why is it you think the Salamander a man? Please, is there something I should know? Johann, he is certain it is, but for myself, I … I have my doubts.’
I’ll bet you do! snorted Kohler silently.
‘And you’d like to know?’ asked Barbie, teasing her now. Would he have sex with her right there on the floor?
‘Yes. Yes, I would,’ she answered demurely.
Kohler could feel her quivering. Ah Gott im Himmel, was the woman having an orgasm over it?
‘Then read the profiles your husband has in his briefcase, Frau Weidling. The first is the most thorough and least speculative. It covers all three of those fires in the Reich in 1938 and suggests strongly that our Salamander is a man. A student at the time of those fires, perhaps, or the jealous lover of one.’
Though taller by far than Barbie, she leaned in close and down to brush her lips against his cheek and give him a tender whiff of perfume. Ah yes. Musk and civet and God knows what all else. Strong and earthy in any case. In heat but not wanting to rut.
Kohler heard her whispering that it was a pity Barbie couldn’t stay longer. ‘It gets so boring sometimes. Johann is always so busy.’
Barbie didn’t spare her. ‘Then perhaps it is, Frau Weidling, that you would enjoy sitting in on one of our interrogations? We have a woman in custody, a girl of twenty-two who refuses to answer my questions.’
‘A woman?’
‘Yes.’
That girl with the bicycle? demanded Kohler silently.
‘If … if I can be of any service, Herr Obersturmführer, you … you have only to ask.’
‘Good.’
The door closed and she stood there pilloried with her forehead pressed against it and her hand still clinging to the knob as she struggled with what Barbie had just implied about her. ‘Enjoy,’ she blurted. ‘Enjoy, ah damn!’
A minute passed. Another and another. Then she brutally locked the door and hurried through to Weidling’s bedroom.
Knowing he’d best leave while he could, Kohler watched her in a sliver of mirror as she read the profiles. She was quick about it, flustering only when she came to the last of them.
Lips parted, she looked up and across the room. Her throat constricted. Her eyes watered. ‘Johann,’ she croaked. ‘Johann, how could you have done this to me?’
The profiles were returned and the briefcase taken with her. Kohler heard her undressing in her bedroom. Her clothes went underfoot and over a chair. A gorgeous figure. A round, high posterior with smooth, tight buttocks, good, slim hips and a long and supple back that gracefully and methodically bent as she undid each of her garters and smoothly rolled the stockings down.
Her breasts were not large but handsome, the nipples rosy and stiffening as, lost in thought, she touched them, then ran her fingers through the richness of her hair and dragged off the bracelets.
Lastly the ear-rings were removed, a hand running down her front to press flatly against her tummy, the dark auburn triangle of her pubes below.
‘So, gut,’ she said in throaty, brutal German. ‘Yes, gut, Herr Obersturmführer. We shall see.’
A chanced look showed her soaking in the tub, smoking a cigarette and sipping cognac with the briefcase beside her on the floor. Self-satisfied and excited. Thrilled by what she had accomplished and by what the future might hold.
She blew on the end of the cigarette and gave that little laugh of a woman in heat knowing gratification was near. She looked at the embers but did not burn herself. She just liked the thought of it perhaps, the thought of pain in other women.
Now that the briefcase was out of reach, there was only one place he could find what was needed and that was in Klaus Barbie’s office just down the street. Gestapo HQ Berlin wouldn’t give it to him. Not after all the trouble Louis and he had caused the SS. They were dead fish, verboten and barely tolerated.
He’d have to manage it somehow.
Piling her hair up with a hand, she went under and for a moment he had only the sight of her cognac glass and the cigarette in its ashtray. Then … then the sight of her posterior rising from the suds like some strange creature of the sea. Gorgeously round and sleek and draining water over a skin that glistened with bath oil, glistened with … Were those the scars of welts? Had she been beaten, not once but several times and long ago?
Then the back … beautifully melded to the hips and seat, but revealing more faint scars.
Ah merde! She’d been thrashed to Jesus.
Finally her head emerged as she gasped, drew in a breath and filled her lungs. Once, twice, three times—still bent over as if beaten and having only just dragged herself up on to her knees.
He could not understand why she had forced herself to stay under so long. It made him uncomfortable and afraid. Muttering, nom de Dieu! Louis, to himself he slipped away, still thinking of the scars.
She would remember she had put the lock on—he had no doubt of it. She went under again and he heard the silence grow as the little wavelets in the tub began to die. She stayed down so long, he turned in panic and was starting back towards her when she came up for air to suck it in and fill the suite with her choking!
Verdammt!
It was almost too much to hope the girl with the bicycle would come to the temporary morgue. As unobtrusively as possible, St-Cyr searched the queue only to find the hush made him increasingly uneasy.
Two abreast and looking shabby through the softly falling snow, the motley line stretched along the rue de la Bourse and around the corner on to the rue du Bat d’Argent, the street of the packsack of silver.
There were far too many French Gestapo plain-clothes in the line—one could spot them so easily from here for they stood in pairs with their snap-brims pulled down, trench coat collars up and cigarettes—yes, in a nation where tobacco was gold, they could afford to toss their butts away and light another.
But apart from them, there was not a whisper of the German presence. Instead, the préfet’s men in dark blue kept order.
Klaus Barbie was using the queue to trap people. Once inside the doors, all papers would be examined and the names recorded to be later checked against the growing list of victims and those other lists: the badly burned who were still in hospital, the not-so-badly-burned who had been treated and released, that of the audience members who had escaped unscathed, and that of all others who in any way had been connected with the cinema of the Beautiful Celluloid.
Barbie had known that those whose sons or other loved ones had disappeared without leaving a forwarding address to avoid the forced labour or to go into hiding for any other reason, the maquis perhaps … all would come in hopes their loved ones had not been found among the dead.
Only in the faces of the curious was there any sign of quickness but even they had had to succumb to the hush of the grieving.
The line crept forward. Occasionally someone would realize what was up and think to tur
n away, only to see that they dare not draw attention to themselves, that it was better to simply tough it out.
He wanted to shout, Go home. It’s a trap! but could not do so, knowing only too well that like them, he, too, could be hustled away and into silence for ever.
When he found the girl, she was nearest the shop fronts, not far from the corner. And he realized then that she was using the windows to mirror the street and warn her if anyone had spotted her. The collar of the fawn-coloured, double-breasted overcoat was turned up. Muffled in a beige angora beret and scarf, she searched the glass as if looking at the window displays of suits made out of human hair or wood fibre and shoes with soles made out of wood or cork.
He let her believe she hadn’t been spotted. Flashing his badge and holding up a cautioning hand to overcome objections, he slid into line four persons behind her. He hoped she would not panic when she discovered she would have to leave her name and address. He must not do anything that would give her away, must not let the préfet or the Gestapo get their hands on her or get any indication of whom he was after.
It took another hour but by then the girl had gone on to view the corpses amid the stench, wearing one of the regulation cloth masks and forcing herself to do so while the préfet confronted him.
‘Well, Louis, is it that you are so brazen you would show your face to me, eh?’
A brawler, a tough in uniform, Guillemette clenched a fist and shook it threateningly. ‘You and Kohler smashed up one of my best men in the rue des Trois Maries last night. Why have you done such a thing? He was there for your own safety, imbecile! Myself, I personally delegated him to watch over the two of you.’
How nice. ‘But … but, Préfet, we thought he was a robber! There was no light. There was someone with him.’
‘Who?’
‘My partner and I never found out. We were forced to leave your man in the street and—’
‘In the gutter, Jean-Louis! A broken nose that will take months to reset, four splintered teeth, twenty-six stitches about the face and five cracked ribs. No wallet or papers, no gun or knife or bracelets. Come, come my friend, what did you and Kohler do with them?’
No gun or knife or handcuffs … the papers stolen …? Ah merde—someone else had taken them! ‘Préfet, those narrow streets are dangerous after curfew. The next time—if there should be a next time—please ask your men to identify themselves well beforehand.’
Guillemette grunted savagely. ‘Don’t play around with me, you little fart from Paris. What were you doing in the rue des Trois Maries?’
Madame Rachline could not have told him of their visit. ‘Nothing, Préfet. We had simply lost our way in the dark.’
‘Bâtard, I ought to have you run in! What address were you after and why?’
Some sort of answer was necessary but it was tempting to refuse absolutely. ‘We were trying to find the pont Alphonse Juin so as to cross the Saône and make our way along the quai Saint Antoine to La Mère Aurora. Perhaps you know of it? A little place, of course, but the food, it is excellent. At least, it was before the Defeat of 1940.’
‘Maudit salaud, you were up to something and should not have been in that street!’
‘Then perhaps the one who followed your man should not have been there either, Préfet, nor should she have taken his gun among other things.’
‘She?’ Ah what was this?
St-Cyr nodded curtly.
‘One of the two women?’ demanded Guillemette swiftly.
‘Perhaps, but then … ah, then, Préfet,’ he shrugged, ‘perhaps my partner and I were mistaken.’
‘A woman.’
Guillemette was no fool. He’d put two and two together and come up with La Belle Époque but … ah, why not tell him a little? ‘A woman, yes. Perhaps.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
It would be best to shrug.
As the préfet turned angrily away in thought, St-Cyr looked down and a name leapt from among the lists on the desk. ‘Martine Charlebois, Apt. 3, Number 12 allée des Villas.’ A flat overlooking the Parc de la Tête d’Or in one of the most fashionable parts of town.
‘Louis … Louis, why are you here?’
‘To see Herr Weidling, Préfet, and to meet with Robichaud.’
‘And Kohler? Where is that one?’
‘Doing his job, Préfet. Keeping himself busy.’
In mirror after mirror Kohler saw himself as he paused in panic among the elegant corridors of the Hotel Terminus. Things never stopped, not even for Christmas. Gestapo Lyon occupied sixty rooms in the fine old hotel. The grey mice and the troops seemed to be everywhere. The bitches from home hammered on their typewriters and teleprinter machines with military precision. Their skirts were hitched up, their backs ramrod stiff, blonde braids pinned into diadems or coiled into buns, and bosoms straining behind grey tunics two sizes too small. Merde, what was he to do? There had been absolutely no chance to get into Klaus Barbie’s office even though the door to that suite of rooms had been open.
Torture was on the third floor and he didn’t want to go up there, not after what he’d seen on that last case. A typewriter stopped. A voice said, ‘Are you looking for someone?’
‘No. No. Just on my way out, fräulein.’
‘Then it is the other direction you want, mein Herr.’
Ducking into a lavatory, he glanced madly about. Grey woollen underpants encircled thick ankles draping themselves over black brogues with heavy laces …
On the third floor it was quiet, a surprise, and when he opened a door, the room he entered held only a plain wooden table, two kitchen chairs and a copper bathtub with a sturdy rod of oak across it.
Uncomfortably he flicked his eyes around the room as he breathed in the mingled stench of excrement, vomit, blood, soap and disinfectant.
There was a poster from home nailed to the beautifully carved panelling, one of those brash soldaten things with Rheinland maidens gazing raptly at the helmeted men of their dreams and the Führer beaming benevolently from among the clouds like God without His Messerschmitt. ‘Morgens Grusse ich dem Führer. Und abends danke ich dem Führer.’ In the morning I greet my Führer. And in the evening I thank him. For this? he wondered sadly. Even the rugs had had to be removed.
Several newspapers were scattered in a corner. Der Stuermer, the Berliner Tageblatt, the Voelkischer Beobachter … Hitler’s own flagship and his magazine, Signal. All light reading while waiting for a prisoner to come round.
Oak planks, a metre long, had been used to knock sense into the recalcitrant. After all, the ‘reinforced’ interrogations were done up here, those in which the prisoner had shown signs of withholding information. One of Barbie’s two German shepherds had defecated among the slats.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Louis, it’s this or nothing.’
When the blaze was going, Kohler added the chairs and then the table but drained the bathtub and made certain the ropes would not plug the hole.
He was downstairs in the toilets when the cry of fire came; he was inside Barbie’s office staring dumbly at the bastard’s bull-whip when the alarm bells began to ring.
Of plaited rawhide, the bullwhip lay coiled on top of a dossier that was clearly marked Frau Kaethe Weidling yet he could not touch the dossier without moving the whip! He felt the panic rising inside himself, a mad, totally uncontrollable watery sickness. He heard the crack of the whip as it snapped back, saw it flash forward to rip his chest open from the right shoulder to the left hip. Ahh …
Then it tore open his left cheek and all of that moment came back and he saw the hot flood of urine growing around his left shoe. Verdammt! He had pissed himself again! Son of a bitch, what was he to do?
Barbie had learned of the incident and had left this little reminder for him.
The alarm bells were still ringing. Determinedly he put the lock on the inner door, fought down the nausea to move the whip, and read:
‘Frau Kaethe Weidling née Voelker, born Schwering 21
April 1913. Father, the banker Karl Ernst Voelker (suicide by shooting, 1921); mother, Gretta Inge, only child of the Kapitän Guenther Horst Ungerfeld, one of the Count Felix von Luckner’s raiders.’ A stern old Prussian no doubt.
‘Married Leiter Karl Johann Weidling 4 September 1938 …’ Right after the Köln fire. Ah nom de Dieu!
The second page gave a full frontal photograph of her as she was today, standing in the nude leaning nonchalantly against a wall. She was holding a small pear, an ornament of some kind, in the cage of her hands and was staring at the viewer as if to say, So, mein Herr, what else is new, except that he did not think she went with men.
The third page was a montage of female victims, and he realized right away that Barbie had had it made from the photographs she had in her bedroom at the Hotel Bristol, and again he could not understand how she had come by them.
The fourth page revealed her holding a lighted match to the breast of Claudine Bertrand. Both women were naked. Claudine was not tied in any way to the ornate iron headboard of the bed, but who had taken the photograph? Who? It could not have been done with their knowledge. Both were far too involved with each other. Claudine had a hand between Frau Weidling’s legs …
Gestapo Lyon, he wondered, or someone else, someone with access to that whorehouse or Madame Rachline herself?
There was talk of matches, of a child so fascinated by fire she would masturbate among lighted candles and brush flame across her skin to heighten sexual awareness.
There was talk of fires, of ‘accidents’ in which ‘no positive proof could be found’. Talk of whippings by a grandfather of the old school, ah yes. Talk of her later searching out other females of a like mind to gratify her unnatural urges, of her visiting whorehouses … but she’d never been a prostitute, had come from too good a family.
Leiter Weidling, a widower, had followed her to Köln. He had personally handled all three investigations and out of fighting those fires had come not only the medals for bravery and the prestige of citations, but also a new and very beautiful young wife.
Had he trapped her into marrying him so as to gain her help, or had she realized that when one wants desperately to hide, one seeks a position of utmost security? What better than the cold arms of an old fire chief, especially if he’d known you had been present at all three of those fires?
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