Gypsy

by J. Robert Janes

  Jean-Louis could not know that a British aircraft had dropped the Gypsy by parachute near Tours on the night of the thirteenth. He could not know that weeks of planning had gone into this and that they had received a message from England telling them to help this safe-cracker, nor could he know that the Gypsy had very quickly proven himself to be far too difficult to handle. They and the British had trusted Janwillem De Vries and he had broken that trust.

  The house on the rue Poliveau was gone – six dead Boches, a terrible complication no one could have foreseen. Hostages would have to be taken. Berlin would insist on nothing but the truth and in the process, their little réseau would be smashed and Jean-Louis and Hermann would be caught up in things and held responsible.

  ‘Alles ist Schicksal,’ she whispered bitterly, borrowing the saying from the German. Everything is controlled by fate. Janwillem De Vries had taken one flask of nitro and a dozen sticks of dynamite. More he couldn’t have carried and was to have come back but had buggered off on them and had severed all contact.

  *

  In the dank blue haze of the Gare Saint-Lazare the clock on the four-cornered tower registered 11.27 p.m. Giselle wondered what was keeping Hermann. He had gone into the ticket office hours ago, it seemed. Oona was watching him through the grating of one of the wickets.

  People hurried, for the curfew was fast approaching and soon everything here would be closed up tightly, the wicket gates slamming down, the doors shutting while Hermann, he … he took his time.

  She studied a faded poster that was behind wire mesh. Waving, sunburnt, big-breasted Rheinmädels smiled at marching soldier boys who lustily sang, ‘Wir fahren gegen England’.

  We’re going to England.

  ‘Don’t believe a word of it,’ said someone in French. Startled, she turned to look up and into the bluest of eyes.

  ‘Where have you been all my life?’ he said. Those eyes of his danced over her, he taking in each feature to linger on her lips, her chin, her eyes and hair. ‘Enchanté,’ he said, and he had the nicest of smiles and yes, it was good for a woman to hear such things.

  ‘Monsieur …?’ she began.

  He was tall and thin – quite distinguished-looking, very handsome, about forty years of age, and the Hauptmann’s uniform he wore carried combat medals and ribbons on its breast.

  ‘Can I give you a lift?’ he asked.

  ‘Ah, no,’ she answered. ‘I … I’m waiting for someone.’

  ‘I thought so,’ he said and sadly shook his head. ‘Another time perhaps.’

  She could not place his accent. Was he a Fleming? There were scars on his face, little slashes where the skin had been parted and left to heal unstitched. He set the fine leather suitcase down, the canvas rucksack too, and began to put on his greatcoat. ‘The Claridge,’ he said. ‘You can reach me there, or is it at the Ritz? I can never remember.’

  He found a scrap of paper in a pocket and nodded as he read it. The hair was blond and closely trimmed, the nose was long but made his expression all the more engaging. A man, a little boy. Mischievous, serious – ah! there was laughter in his eyes as he watched her scrutiny deepen.

  ‘Your name?’ he asked. ‘At least allow me that.’

  ‘Giselle le Roy.’

  ‘Must you really wait for him?’ He nodded towards the ticket office and she realized he had known all along that Hermann was in there.

  Two of the scars were high up on the cheekbones and equally placed. The third one was on the bridge of that nose. For a moment the hands of the clock stood still. Giselle tore her eyes away to the ticket office, to Oona who was starting towards them. Oona … she tried to cry out. The blast erupted. Flames, debris, dust and smoke flew at her, she shrieking, ‘Oona! Oona!’ as she felt herself being dragged to cover, to hit the floor and be buried under him … him … Bang … a deafening BANG!

  No one came running. Dazed, some bleeding, people picked themselves up. A large piece of glass shattered at her feet. Another and another. Pigeons scattered. Sparrows grew silent.

  Three of their number fell, and when their little bodies hit the floor, they bounced.

  ‘Hermann …?’ began Giselle. ‘Hermann!’

  A hand caught her and dragged her back. She fought to pull away. She shrieked, ‘Let go of me!’ and he did, but did not smile.

  The house at 3 rue Laurence-Savart was occupied and St-Cyr knew it right away. The perfume of smouldering animal dung was pungent. ‘We dry it first,’ said a female voice.

  Startled, he looked questioningly at the century-old cast-iron stove in the kitchen where the last pages of About’s The King of the Mountains had disappeared. The smell reminded him of films he had seen of darkest Africa, of slaves and villages and King Solomon’s mines.

  Madame Suzanne-Cécilia Lemaire, the veterinary surgeon and zoo-keeper from the Jardin des Plantes and the rue Poliveau, had moved in.

  ‘Hermann won’t believe it of the dung,’ he said. ‘He has the curiosity of a small boy towards all things French but this …’

  ‘Aren’t you going to try the soup?’ she asked and only then did he see her curled up on the floor beside the stove. ‘It’s warmer here.’

  The soup was thick and of onions and garlic, yet the dung had purged the air of its aroma. ‘You’ll get used to it,’ she said. ‘One gets used to lots of things. This Occupation of ours teaches us that humility and ingenuity are blood brothers to survival.’

  ‘It has simply broken down a lexicon of social customs which should have been cast aside long ago,’ he said tartly. ‘Did Madame Courbet give you any trouble?’

  The housekeeper who lived across the street and had a spare key … ‘She looked me over, tossed her head and clucked her tongue before raking me with that voice of hers. “Men, all they think about is rutting with a woman! Old enough to be your father, madame. A Chief Inspector of the Sûreté, for shame! His wife hasn’t been dead two months. The period of mourning must be respected!”’

  ‘For Madame Courbet it has to last an eternity,’ he sighed. ‘She questions everything. A pair of high-heeled shoes I brought home once. A heel was broken – did she tell you that? They were the shoes of a girl I had met on a street after curfew. She was avoiding the patrol and her feet were freezing.’

  ‘But you didn’t bring her home like me. Only her shoes.’ And so much for ‘social customs which should have been cast aside long ago’.

  ‘What else did the street’s most virulent gossip tell you?’

  ‘That you have; been seeing another woman, but that this chanteuse comes seldom and only in the small hours at curfew’s end, and sometimes with a general as her companion. That you desperately need looking after. That you are a hero to her son Antoine and the other boys of the street but that they are saying you were never home and that your poor wife – Ah! she was all but a virgin after five and a half years of marriage and, like the first wife, just couldn’t stand the stress of not having sex, so ran off, this one with a German officer who gave her a lot of it but … but she had to come home when he was sent away to Russia to die.’

  A mouthful, and thank you, Madame Courbet! ‘Hermann had the house repaired. The bomb smashed the front wall and every pane of glass on the street.’

  ‘And now?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s at the Gare Saint-Lazare, I think. Looking into that robbery. Late, of course. One of us should have been on the scene as soon as we had word of it but …’

  ‘But the Gypsy kept you on the run.’

  ‘He tried to kill us again.’

  Hurriedly she got out of the nest she had made for herself, dragging blankets she wrapped around herself.

  ‘Build up the fire. Open the draught. Buffalo is better but zebra will have to do.’

  The snow was terrible, the quai Saint-Bernard an impasse into which the tiny slits of blue-shaded headlamps fought for visibility.

  Gabrielle knew it was crazy of her to have come out on a night like this without a laissez-passer and so close to curfew,
but Céci had to be warned.

  No lights shone in the Jardin des Plantes. Only by feeling its way, did the little Peugeot two-door sedan finally manage the gates, which were locked, of course.

  Leaving the engine running – cursing herself again and all that had gone wrong – she struggled out. Snow rose to her ankles. Her silk stockings would be ruined. The engine didn’t sound too good either. Was there water in the gasoline again?

  She rang the bell. Old Letouche, the concierge, was almost stone deaf. He’d be asleep. Had he died in his sleep?

  Shivering, railing at herself, she blew on gloved fingers and stamped her high-heels to pack the snow down a little. ‘Monsieur,’ she called out. ‘It’s me, Gabrielle. Is Suzanne-Cécilia here?’

  ‘Not here,’ came the frayed, wind-tattered voice.

  ‘But she had nowhere else to go? I was worried about her?’

  ‘Not here. Gone to the detective’s house.’

  ‘The detective’s …?’

  ‘He offered, she accepted. I gave her my share of the dung to help her along. It’s freezing in here without a fire.’

  ‘Which detective?’

  ‘The one with the house, of course. “The difficult one”, she said.’

  Dismayed, she looked away in the direction of Belleville. She couldn’t go to the house, not until the curfew was over. ‘And by then,’ she asked herself, retreating to the car, ‘will it be too late?’

  What had begun with so much promise had fast become a nightmare. The Gypsy had proved himself far too difficult to handle. They had lined up the robberies for him but he had gone his own way and had done nearly all of them in one night! They didn’t even know where he was hiding.

  ‘And as for this Tshaya of his, if the Gestapo get their hands on her, she’ll be only too willing to betray us and already must know far too much.’

  It was a mess – it was worse than that. It was a catastrophe! ‘Zèbre,’ she said from behind the wheel now. Why but for the intrusion of fate – ‘Yes, fate!’ – had the British chosen to use such a code name?

  They couldn’t have known the wireless set was hidden in the zebra house. Direction-finding at such long distances was simply too inaccurate. Even the German direction-finding vans had to get in really close.

  The Wehrmacht’s Funkabwehr unit and now, also, the Gestapo’s Listeners constantly monitored the airwaves for clandestine transmissions. They used three widely spaced listening sets and, drawing lines from each of these to the source, triangulated the approximate location. Then, by repeatedly smaller triangulations as they moved in with their listening vans, they narrowed things down until, at the last, a house or flat could be singled out.

  But so far the réseau had seen no sign of any such activity. Suzanne-Cécilia had been very, very careful. Transmissions were kept to a bare minimum and were always given at the same time and on the same frequency. Now only once a week and on Fridays at 0150 hours Berlin time.

  It had to have been coincidence, the British using Zebra as the code name. It had to have been!

  ‘I must do something,’ she said. ‘I can’t just sit idly by and let De Vries destroy everything we’ve worked so hard for!’

  Single-handedly, and over nearly eighteen months, Suzanne-Cécilia had painstakingly assembled the wireless transceiver from parts she had gathered. Oh for sure they had talked of doing something – anything – but the times had not been right, the Occupation so very difficult.

  But then on a cold, clear night in October of last year, and well before she had met Jean-Louis and Hermann, Céci’s faint tappings into the ether had finally brought a response, NOUS VOUS LISONS. We read you.

  Cécilia had used, and still did, her modification of the French Army code of her husband’s unit – one of many, and yes, the Germans would be aware of it, but what else could she have done? By some quirk of – yes, fate again – the code book had been sandwiched among the bloodstained letters that had been returned to her along with her dead husband’s boots.

  Lieutenant Honoré Lemaire had been in the same unit as her own dead husband, and it wouldn’t take Jean-Louis long to discover this. ‘The Society of Those Who Have Been Left Behind, eh?’ she said bitterly. ‘Of course we are working together!’

  Tasks had been assigned by London. The constant comings and goings of generals and other high-ranking officers – the troops too. Ah! she herself did this. It was easy for her. The audience at the Club Mirage changed constantly. The boys all loved her, trusted her. She was their loyal friend.

  The sales of major international works of art at the Jeu de Paume – stolen, many of them. Could a list be provided? Of course! She was known to frequent the sales, often on the arm of a German general or other high-ranking official.

  The sales of priceless antiques too, in the rooms of the Hôtel Drouot, the Paris auction house.

  So many things and all of it had been working so well but then Jean-Louis and Hermann had solved the Sandman murders. The child, the heiress, had lost her only friends and her parents too, and had been left all alone in the world.

  Would London help? The child’s father had been a noted designer of weapons. The couple had gone to England just before the blitzkrieg and had not been able to return, had supposedly died in the bombing of Coventry.

  On 15 January at 0150 hours London had sent its answer. It hadn’t helped. They couldn’t have sent over things like that.

  Right after the message there had been a distinct break of several seconds – end of transmission – but then, suddenly, the green light had come on again and another message had come in. A message she could not have revealed to Jean-Louis and still could not do so.

  The Gypsy had been dropped near Tours on the night of the thirteenth. Code name Zebra, but by then, of course, Nana and Suzanne-Cécilia and herself had known he was in Paris because he had arrived on the fourteenth.

  Puzzled as to why there should have been that break in the transmission, Gabrielle took out the quartz crystal the child had given them. She looked away into the darkness and the falling snow to where she knew the zebra paddock and house must lie. Céci’s surgery and laboratory of physiology were very convenient to the zebra house, and it had been perfect. It really had. As veterinary surgeon, she could legitimately spend nights here tending sick animals. No one would have thought to question this.

  ‘But now?’ she asked herself. ‘What now?’

  The dust had settled in the Gare Saint-Lazare but the ringing in the ears would probably never go away.

  Kohler tried to get his bearings. The ticket office was a shambles. The massive door to the old iron safe was off its hinges, bent, ripped apart and still disgorging sand and bricks, and half embedded in the floor.

  ‘I told you not to tamper with that dial, Inspector. I warned you the safe had a booby trap built into its locking mechanism!’

  The sous-chef de gare was livid. ‘Then why didn’t it blow off the Gypsy’s hands?’

  ‘The portrait, yes? The Maréchal, you idiot! Have you forgotten this?’

  Tattered, dust-covered and furious, the little twerp blinked and apprehensively licked the dust from his lips when he saw the Kripo take a step towards him.

  On the wall above the safe, Pétain, and before him legions of former presidents, had looked sternly out at ticket agent and buyer. Nearly one hundred years of thumbprints had greased the lower left corner of that picture frame and wall. The damned thing had been slid aside enough times for the world to have seen the marks from any three of the wickets.

  The combination had been written in pencil on the wall but the Gypsy had changed the settings. He’d written the new combination above the old one, the numerals so perfect one had to wonder about the severity of his schooling as a boy, but no one had wanted to try the numbers.

  The booby trap … A travelling salesman fresh off the boat from Buffalo, New York, in 1903, had installed the bloody thing on a trial basis and had never come back for it. The Badger Safe Protector. Two little vi
als of fulminate of mercury probably, but those hadn’t blown the door off and wrecked the room.

  For that De Vries had used the fulminate to detonate a charge of nitro or dynamite. Three or four sticks at least.

  ‘The bomb boys can pick up the pieces and tell us all about it. How many dead?’

  ‘I do not know. None so far.’

  In the pandemonium of injured and rescuer, cop, stretcher-bearer and nurse, there was no sign of Oona or Giselle. Oona had been at one of the wickets. He, himself, had taken shelter before using a length of cord to pull the handle open. He had called out to her to leave and she had … ‘Oona!’ he cried out, startling several. A flic started for him, a Feldgendarm also …

  Desperately he searched the hall. Both of their backs were to him. She was standing beside Giselle who had an arm about Oona’s waist. There were no cuts, no abrasions. She must have tripped and fallen to the floor. They were staring at a poster … a poster!

  DANCE

  TANGO, WALTZ ETC AND ALL THE LATEST BALLROOM DANCES

  LESSONS AND CLASSES

  Madame jeséauel, Professeur Diplômé, et Mademoiselle

  Nana Thélème, danseuse électriaue de flamenco.

  Studio Pleyel No. 6

  252 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, Paris

  Téléphone: Carnot 33.56

  Deutsch spoken

  se habla espanol

  5

  The revolver weighed at least a kilogram when loaded. The build was grim, the grip firm, and when Nana Thélème pulled the hammer back, it made two clicks, at half-cock and the full.

  She knew it was madness to have such a thing. The box had been wrapped in newspaper but tied with a red silk rose and left with the coat-check girl downstairs in the club but now …

  She pulled the trigger. The click, as the firing pin struck an empty chamber, was louder still. There were six packets of cartridges, one hundred and twenty rounds, the two other revolvers. All had been cleaned of the grease that had protected them from rust over the years in that safe at the Gare Saint-Lazare. They looked brand-new.