Arrest would have been guaranteed. Three months in the women’s cells of the Santé, the Petite Rouquette or Fresnes were the usual, any of which would have sufficed if she had hoped to lose the baby.
The bored flic behind the desk at the quartier Saint-Germain-des-Prés’s Commissariat de Police on the rue de l’Abbaye thought he was out of his skull. She wasn’t in the emergency room at the Hôpital Laennec on the rue des Sèvres though everyone agreed that when young girls get pregnant they might well do crazy things.
She and Oona were sitting spellbound beneath the smoke-hazed, garlic-and-onions beam of the projector at the Cluny on the boulevard Saint-Germain, her favourite cinema. Hats on, hats off … The place was packed. Couples were making out here, there, it didn’t matter where so long as they had the chance … The screen was filled with a shabby Marseille flat. An abortionist … ah verdammt! One so evil, the camera zoomed in on the ingrained dirt of the bastard’s cracked fingernails. A terrible eye was clouded by cataracts. A shrew of a wife was railing at him from behind beaded curtains, and at his fresh innocent, his most recent victim.
Helpless, the young would-be virgin looked about the room with abject dismay. There’d be a catheter, a pair of surgical tongs and a length of rubber tubing whose syringe would suck soapy water from a bucket as the bulb was squeezed. Then it’d be down with the underpants, up with the knees … ‘Wider … a little wider, mademoiselle.’ Right in past the cervix, deeply … ‘Up … I must get it up a little more.’ Squish! A massive shock, the girl probably dead in a split second as air entered her bloodstream. A pretty thing, a hell of a waste … ‘Giselle! Oona!’
Kohler stopped himself, his heart racing. He and Louis had seen it all not a week ago. A maker of little angels and a fleabitten tenement across the river in Courbevoie and definitely not the figment of celluloid.
‘Come with me. Please! I … I couldn’t find you. I was worried. Hey, I’ve got to go over to the Gare Saint-Lazare and need a bit of company. Louis … Louis is busy with other things.’
Still in the dressing-room at the Club Mirage, St-Cyr touched a finger to his lips, and taking out some scraps of paper and a pencil, quickly wrote, Cartier’s. The Gypsy knew the combination of the sous-directeur’s safe.
Questioningly Gabrielle raised her eyebrows.
Did you tell him of it? he demanded in pencil, thrusting the paper at her.
Out in the club, the audience were now clamouring for her. ‘How can you think such a thing?’ she asked aloud. ‘At least let us give the happy couple a bassinet and a few baby blankets. Giselle will need so many things.’
Gestapo Paris’s Listeners could make what they would of that. Someone is helping the Gypsy. The robbery at the Ritz for sure; Cartier’s for sure, and probably the Gare Saint-Lazare.
‘Not us,’ she said, a whisper but given too quickly – she could see him thinking this and dreaded his response for she hadn’t said Not me and should have.
Patently ignoring the mistake but filing it away, he wrote, Please tell me where you were on Tuesday the twelfth.
‘I …’ she began, only to stop herself. He’d check. He wouldn’t hold back, even though he loved her – did he really love her? She wanted to believe this but they had been alone together so seldom. I had to go to Tours, she quickly wrote. There, does that satisfy you?
‘A little,’ he said and wrote, Did you meet Nana Thélème in Tours?
‘A rattle …? Is it that you wish to give the baby a rattle?’ she asked aloud and, saddened by his insistence on pursuing the matter, answered, Yes! in writing, but quite by accident. We had a cup of coffee in a small café.
And did she ask you to drive her to Senlis on the folloiuing day?
Gabrielle flinched in despair.
The dynamite, he wrote. Someone is supplying the Gypsy with it.
From Senlis? she asked, writing it out for him and listening for the Gestapo – waiting tensely for them to barge in and shriek, ‘Hände hoch!’
She lighted a candle and burned all the scraps of paper.
‘Giselle must want this baby very badly, Jean-Louis, but will your partner make an honest woman of her now that his wife has gained her divorce and has found another?’
Back home in Wasserburg, ex-wife Gerda had married an indentured French farm labourer, a humiliation Hermann had yet to complain about and probably never would.
St-Cyr waited for Giselle’s answer about the dynamite but she refused. Tears began to mist her lovely eyes. The stone quarries, he harshly wrote. The prospector Nana went to Tours to meet. Monsieur jacqmain asked her to go to Senlis.
To see his dying mother! That was all. I swear it. I could not refuse, she wrote and burst into tears.
In dismay, he saw before him what he’d seen when they’d first met: a determined evasiveness, lies and half-lies and every possible female ruse.
There had been some rough but beautifully coloured diamonds then; there were diamonds now.
Do you still belong to the Society of Those Who Have Been Left Behind?
The war widows. ‘Why should I not?’ she demanded aloud. His nod was curt, his whole being the detective she had first encountered. ‘My friends are clamouring for me. Will you come and listen?’
Neither of them had touched the vodka or the caviar. ‘Of course. But first …’
There was silence as he took from a pocket the crystal of clear quartz they both had been given last Saturday – his last investigation; a child of eleven, an heiress. Had she been a clairvoyant, that child? ‘It is magic,’ she had said so seriously. ‘You will need it, I’m afraid, for the cards are not good. A visitor is to come into your lives who will pit you against each other with terrible consequences. Please do not forget this. Remember to be true to each other.’
The crystal was one of those ‘diamonds’ of the curious stone and mineral trade, a dipyramid perhaps two centimetres by one and a half, six-sided and pointed at both ends but grown lopsidedly and full of internal fractures. They had gone to meet the child at a villa in Neuilly on the far side of the Bois de Boulogne. On the way, Jean-Louis had received a telex that had been meant for Hermann, since all such messages were directed to his partner. MOST URGENT. REPEAT URGENT. IKPK HQ BERLIN REPORTS INTERNATIONAL SAFE-CRACKER GYPSY REPEAT GYPSY HAS REPORTEDLY SURFACED. LAST SEEN TOURS 1030 HOURS 14 JANUARY HEADING FOR PARIS. APPREHEND AT ONCE. HEIL HITLER.
Jean-Louis did not know the réseau to which she belonged had received a wireless message tacked on to what the British had sent regarding the child’s parents.
GYPSY … REPEAT GYPSY DROPPED TOURS NIGHT OF 13 JANUARY. PROVIDE EVERY ASSISTANCE. MOST URGENT. REPEAT URGENT. WILL HAVE EXPLOSIVES. GIVE FULL PRIORITY. CODE NAME ZEBRA.
The Gypsy hadn’t had any explosives even though London had said he would have them. He had denied it to their faces, but of course they had already taken care of the matter on the thirteenth, during the trip to Senlis.
Three women. Nana, Suzanne-Cécilia and herself. Dynamite. Code name Disaster.
Nitroglycerine also, and plenty of blasting caps and fuse. Ah Jésus, jésus, what were they to do?
The Gare Saint-Lazare was the world’s third largest railway station. Gargantuan, it was divided into two long arrival-and-departure sections by an immense hall, every one of whose panes of glass, high up there above, had been crisscrossed by strips of brown sticking paper and given a thick and repulsive wash of laundry bluing.
The resulting gloom was only increased by the paucity of blue-washed lamps, the whole having a distinctly other-world feeling. Breath steamed. People spoke quietly. Though they hurried to and fro, the cumulative hush was broken only by stifled coughs, sneezes and the clack-clacking of wooden-soled high-heels. ‘Giselle …’
The girl kicked off her shoes and Oona gathered them in. Kohler knew he was in trouble. The two of them had given him the silent treatment all the way across town. ‘Look, I’m sorry, eh? Hey, I’ll take you both to the pictures tomorrow night. I swear it. The same ones if
you want.’
‘It’s not what I want!’ hissed Giselle, meaning an abortion. ‘I’ll kill myself first!’
‘Oona, talk some sense into her.’
‘Me? Haven’t I done enough? Didn’t I find her sitting in front of that window debating arrest? Didn’t I convince her to see that film? Pah! why should I say anything? It’s your job. You’re the father!’
‘Verdammt! I want her to have the kid.’
There, he had got that out at last. ‘And what about me?’ she demanded.
Ah merde, where the hell was he to find the chef de gare or the sous-chef? he wondered. Pedestrians became travellers of the deep under clocks whose Roman numerals registered an alien time. 10.57 p.m. Tattered, picked-at posters advertised excursions to Deauville. Sun, sea and sand, and wouldn’t that be lovely except for it being the fiercest winter on record?
Condensation had frozen on the inside of walls and windows. Furtive sparrows sought warmth up there, pigeons too. The floor was spattered with their droppings.
Achtung! Achtung! Avertissement: Peine de mort contre les saboteurs. Warning: Death to saboteurs.
Beneath the notice someone had scratched: Les dés sont jetés en Russe. The dice have been cast in Russia.
For a moment time was transfixed and one saw clearly the shabby suitcases and the clothing people wore, the made-overs, cast-offs and hand-me-downs, the things rescued from the thirties and from the trunks of long-dead relatives.
A girl tried to straighten her grandmother’s black lisle stockings, another was checking the seams of the paint job she had given her bare legs.
Soldier boys came and went. Les filles de la nuit plied their trade but could only wait to be asked, since here the law prevailed and the place was thick with cops of all kinds.
Kohler knew only too well that if one wanted to hide, as the Gypsy must, the city was by far the best of places.
There was a Wehrmacht soup kitchen for the boys that had come from the bunkers of the north. Soup with potatoes in it and maybe a bit of meat. Black bread and margarine.
He managed two servings and led Giselle and Oona to a bench. ‘Now wait here, please,’ he begged. ‘I’ve got a little job to do.’
‘And me … what about me, Hermann?’ demanded Oona. ‘You have not answered my question.’
‘Later, eh? I’m busy.’
Croissants, baguettes, brioches and pâtisseries were all banned and had been for nearly two years now. The daily bread ration, if one could get it, had been reduced to two 25 gram slices. A notice advertised that a reward of 100,000 francs would be paid for information leading to the arrest of terrorists or those assisting them. There were soldier-warnings about syphilis, tuberculosis and cancer – Berlin believed the French were rife with these diseases. Others warned the citizenry of the dangers of eating cats – the rat population would explode and bring on the bubonic plague.
Giselle chewed a doubtful morsel then decided to discreetly drop it under the bench. When she found a much-thumbed, tattered notice for the restaurant La Potinière at the Hôtel Normandy in Deauville, she stared at it for the longest time.
‘Potage normand,’ she said with longing. ‘Huîtres au gratin. Darnes de saumon à la crème ou tripe à la mode de Caen. Poulet à la Vallée d’Auge, salade Cauchoise, soufflé surprise et … et Puits d’amour.’
One longed for the past but also for the simplest things. Far from menus like that, Giselle had spoken repeatedly of late of poached eggs and glasses of milk. ‘Don’t worry so much, chérie,’ soothed Oona. ‘You’ll be all right. I’ll see you through. I promise.’
‘You’re so good to me. If there wasn’t this Occupation, would it be the same?’ She tossed her pretty head.
The short, jet black hair, clear, rosy cheeks and stunning violet eyes were lovely. ‘You’d still need a nounou.’
A nanny. ‘I’ve no training in having babies. I’m not the mothering kind.’
‘Wait till she nurses, then you’ll know for sure where you stand. Now come on, finish your soup and bread. Dream of Deauville, eh? and of better times. Cream puffs.’
‘“Wells of Love”.’
‘Oysters au gratin. Salmon steaks in cream …’
‘“She” …? Why is it, please, that you feel it will be a girl?’
‘Ah! why would you ask me that? I hate this lousy war. My two children gone from me, my husband too!’ Oona threw her tin cup away and tore her hair in anguish.
Kohler hurried back to comfort her, saying, ‘Hey now, I’m going to take care of you both.’
Blonde, blue-eyed, tall, graceful and about forty years of age, Oona had lost her children during the blitzkrieg, her husband, a Jew, to the French Gestapo of the rue Lauriston and not so long ago …
When he found the safe, it was waiting for him and Kohler knew at once that here was trouble of a far different sort. It was huge. It was ancient. Its door was closed and locked but there was something sinister about this and when he asked the sous-chef de gare, he discovered the door had been left open by the Gypsy, but had been later closed and locked and only then had they discovered that the wheel-pack had been reset. Now no one dared to try to open the damned thing.
It was as if the Gypsy was tempting him. It was as if he shouldn’t weaken and yield to the challenge.
‘Louis, this guy’s playing with us all the time,’ he said, but Louis wasn’t here.
The vodka had remained untouched, the caviar too, but they were again writing notes to each other in the dressing-room.
The dynamite, Gabrielle. I must insist that if you know of it, you tell me how the Gypsy came by it.
She couldn’t tell him the truth. She mustn’t! Perhaps he had it xvith him – have you thought of this?
She was still being evasive. Are you suggesting he first extracted the nitro he used at the Ritz and then found he needed more?
Two boil-ups, the last at the house on the rue Poliveau … Mon Dieu, how could you possibly think I would know anything of such?
The Resistance, your little réseau?
We don’t do things like that! We’re women. We have no such experience.
Was the réseau composed only of women? he wondered. He tried to kill us, Gabrielle! He booby-trapped our car!
She was visibly shaken and stammered, ‘I … I didn’t know of this. Forgive me.’
Fine. He’d be firm now and give the next question aloud. ‘Tell me why on Monday last you did not pick up the jewellery you had ordered at Cartier’s?’
So, they were back to that again and Jean-Louis wanted the Gestapo to listen in, but why had the Gypsy tried to kill them? They hadn’t told Janwillem to do so. They had only warned him to be careful of them, that if anyone could stop him, it was them. ‘I was too busy.’
‘A moment, please. Ah! I have it here in my notebook. Laviolette, the sous-directeur, said that you wished to argue with yourself a little more. It was a great deal of money. The authorities … someone might question such an expense. It would have to be declared.’
‘That is correct.’
‘Then why, please, did you just tell me you were too busy?’ He nodded for her to speak aloud.
‘Now that you have reminded me, I do remember. He was most distressed. Certainly I promised to collect the pieces first thing on Tuesday but by then, it … well, it was too late, wasn’t it?’
‘Please don’t distress yourself.’ It doesn’t become you! he wrote. ‘Someone told the Gypsy of the contents of the safe and gave him the combination.’
Again their were tears. ‘Have you questioned everyone at Carrier’s?’ she blurted.
‘Not yet.’
‘Then perhaps, Inspector, you will find among them the accomplice if such a one exists!’
She was still not co-operating! He raised his voice. ‘There was a blanket laissez-passer in that safe and a first-class railway pass. The Gypsy can have those altered – a difficulty, yes, since he’s on the run but whoever is helping him could take care of it.’
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br /> Did the Gestapo suspect her of this too? she wondered but said softly, ‘Tshaya … the newspapers are saying a gypsy girl is with him.’
‘I’ve not had time to read them.’
‘They say she was married to a boxer but that he whipped her savagely.’
‘What else do they say?’
‘That she’s the Gypsy’s lover and that the two of them will turn the city upside down before they leave. That only then will the memory of them be left to last the centuries.’
Will they be apprehended?
Never! Of this I can guarantee.
You?
The press. I meant to say the press. Ah damn …
St-Cyr knew he had to warn her that the Germans had released the Gypsy from the Mollergaten-19 in Oslo but if she was taken in for questioning, this would be the first thing Herr Max would ask.
Look after yourself.
You also.
‘Do you have your receipt from Cartier’s for the 8,600,000 francs?’
‘Yes, it’s in my purse.’
He snapped his fingers. She smiled faintly and when she handed him the beaded silk purse, which was another of her trademarks, he looked questioningly at her.
The purse had been left at the scene of that nothing murder. ‘I thought it appropriate,’ she said, looking steadily at him.
Without a word St-Cyr put the receipt into his wallet. Then he reached for his glass, and raising it, said grimly, ‘À ta santé, Gabrielle.’
She took hers up and, though it was foolish and proud of her, gave him good health in Russian. ‘Za vashe zdorov’e, Jean-Louis.’
The door closed and he was gone from her, the caviar untouched, a waste yet she had no desire for it and, sitting down at her dressing-table, picked up the quartz crystal he had deliberately left for her.
Very thin slices of such crystals, if clear of fractures and inclusions, were used in shortwave wireless transceivers. Each thickness let in or out wavelengths of only a very narrow band. Their set had two such ‘crystals’: one for daytime use, which they never used but kept for emergencies only; and one for the small hours of the night which were best for transmitting and receiving.
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