‘The 1873 Modèle d’ordonnance,’ she said, a whisper. Why had Janwillem sent them to her? She had loved him. She would have done anything for him. ‘I didn’t betray you in Oslo!’ she swore softly and clenched a fist. ‘Tshaya must have but you … you are still blaming me. She’s a Gestapo informer, Jani. A betrayer of others too!’
Picking up the card that had been inside the box, she hurriedly reread it. Pour toi, chérie, et pour tes amies de l’armée secrète. Bonne chance.
Bâtard! she silently cried. He had told them he had escaped during the battle for Norway in the spring of 1940. A trawler to England, and bravo! She had wished it with all her heart. But had the British then found him such a nuisance they had been only too willing to get rid of him, or had he simply lied enough to convince them of his usefulness in France?
And what missions had the British assigned him, in addition to their own targets? The safes of the SS at numéro 84 avenue Foch? Those of the Abwehr at the Hotel Lutétia, or those of von Stülpnagel, the Military Governor of France?
Three revolvers. One for herself, one for Suzanne-Cécilia, and the last for Gabrielle.
He had had no need of them and had never used a gun during all of the robberies he had committed. ‘I prefer explosives,’ he had once said and had given her that smile of his which had warmed her heart with its gentleness and yet had been so full of gypsy mischief. ‘They’re much better, but like a good woman, you have to know how far you can go with them.’
He had gone too far with her, had promised marriage early in 1938 but had then taken up again with Tshaya and had left for Oostende at that one’s beckoning.
And from there, the two of them had gone to Oslo.
Mollergaten-19, prisoner 3266, cell D2. Seven long months of solitary confinement for one who had always been free, and then cell C27. Three other convicts for constant company, the space shared being no more than 8 square metres. Four bunks to a cell, and a tiny, grilled window too high to look out of and forbidden in any case.
Had he told Tshaya he couldn’t stay with her any more, that he was to have a son? Had he said he was going to marry her arch rival?
Prison would have been enough to have made him hate her instead of Tshaya. None of her letters to him before the war had been opened. All had been returned. Only sketchy details of his existence had been provided by the prison authorities.
And now he was giving not just herself but the others a last chance. Three revolvers against those of the Gestapo, the SS and the Wehrmacht.
The soup had been excellent, the Chief Inspector St-Cyr more than content. No matter the lateness of the hour, and she but a perfect stranger, he liked to have a woman about the house at 3 rue Laurence-Savart. He was pleased the clothing of his dead wife had fitted so well. The long and heavy white flannelette nightgown from Brittany was warm enough perhaps. The black lisle stockings could not be seen but for a slice of ankle above the low-heeled black leather pumps. Grey flannel trousers had been rolled up out of sight but were ready in case she needed to escape a Gestapo visit.
Suzanne-Cécilia was glad she had taken the time to ruffle her hair so that it would constantly remind him of her awakening.
‘Madame,’ he said, having given up all thought of rationing the last of his emergency pipe tobacco, ‘let me ask again if you know Mademoiselle Nana Thélème?’
‘The chanteuse at the Club Monseigneur and also sometimes at the Schéhérazade?’
‘Yes, that’s the one.’
Her soft brown eyes would not duck away as some might have done but would gaze steadfastly at him with complete candour. ‘Does she have a little boy?’
Merde, why must she continue to avoid things? ‘There’s no perhaps about it. He’s the Gypsy’s son.’
She tossed her auburn curls at his gruffness. ‘It’s a family matter then. No. No, I cannot say that I have made her acquaintance. So many people come and go at the Jardin. Saturday afternoons and Sundays are busiest, even in winter. My work does not allow me close contact with any of them.’
‘Yet you became the mistress of one.’
‘Clément Laviolette, of Cartier’s, yes. It’s a puzzle, isn’t it?’ Did he think it a tragedy? she wondered.
Neither Gabrielle nor Nana Thélème could possibly have been recently in touch with her, thought St-Cyr. The risk of using the telephone would have been too great but, still, she must be very aware of Gestapo interest in herself because of the house on the rue Poliveau if nothing else. ‘Tell me then,’ he asked, ‘why is it that Mademoiselle Thélème said you let her son feed the wolves?’
‘I can only tell you what I know to be true, Inspector. If this … this singer of gypsy songs says she has met me, well … what can I say but that the chance meeting so often leaves no memory.’
He sighed in despair. He looked at her steadily as if in judgement and, yes, Gabrielle had said he was persistent but why had he suddenly taken to using his matchbox as if it were a wireless key? Gabi had told him about having access to a transceiver – yes, of course – but not about herself. Never that!
The message came to an end. It had read: sos GESTAPO, and she thought he had tapped that out because of listening devices in the house and this sickened her, but then he said, ‘Your husband, madame. Please tell me a little about him.’
He slid the matchbox across the table. She winced. She knew her fingers were trembling and that he could feel this as she took the box from him.
Trapped, her answer was perfect. HE WAS THE WIRELESS OPERATOR FOR HIS UNIT. HE DIED AT SEDAN DURING THE INVASION AS I HAVE ALREADY TOLD YOU.
St-Cyr took the matchbox from her. I TOO WAS A SIGNALS OPERATOR BUT IN THE WAR BEFORE THIS ONE.
Ah! she silently said and tossed that pretty head of hers.
SO MADAME LET US NOW GET DOWN TO BUSINESS BEFORE. IT IS TOO LATE FOR ALL OF US.
*
At 2.47 a.m. tobacco smoke filled the air, the lights were low on hanging carpets, cushions, brasses, samovars and plush red-velvet drapes. Kohler let his gaze sift over the Club Monseigneur’s tables, Giselle and Oona did too, looking always for the Gypsy.
Gestapo, SS and Wehrmacht officers, teary-eyed and homesick, most of them – Mein Gott what sentimentalists! – sat with their women or unaccompanied except for black-market big shots and gangsters, all lost, it seemed, to the haunting melancholy of a clear and soft serenity that carried yet a sense of restlessness all found slightly disturbing. It was as if unsatisfied, the chanteuse – the gypsy woman in the red dress and through her, her audience – sought constantly for the unattainable. Long pauses accompanied repeated phrases. Rhythm drove her more and more to seek the release she wanted. Tune after tune followed but now a vigorousness crept in, the orchestra in their black corduroy trousers, white blouses, tasselled felt caps, sashes at the waist and high, brown leather boots, straining with her, racing … racing until … until, with a whirlwind of violins, cimbaloms and tambourines, that voice of hers lifted the audience out of their melancholy. It raced away with them in rushes. Its volume swelled. She shouted. They stood. They clapped. They cheered. And as she continued to throw her hair, to sing, to clash those heels of hers on the stage and bash her tambourine, the violinists dispersed among the tables, playing here, there, their cap-tassels jerking, the music electric, fierce, fast, the piece exploding again and again as individual violinists competed against each other until … until the woman in red with the earrings of gold coins, her linked belt of them and bracelets too, had raised her long, lithe arms.
With a crash! the song came to an end. Exhausted, she bowed her head and for an instant her eyes were closed, each feature fixed in memory: the long, jet black hair that was parted in the middle but allowed tonight to fall loosely to her shoulders, the sharpness of dark black eyebrows against the soft hazel of her skin, the cheekbones high, the nose and chin proud and undefeated. The rising and falling of her chest was half hidden by the neckline of her dress whose shade had faded with the lights and now was matt red, warm,
deep and like the embers of a fire just waiting to be fanned into flame.
This was Nana Thélème. Kohler shook his head in admiration – he’d hate to have to arrest her for anything, would hate to let the Gestapo or Herr Max get their hands on her. ‘Formidable!’ he croaked. ‘Louis should have heard her.’
He marvelled that she could sing at all. The split in her lower lip had been well disguised, the swollen cheek hidden under rouge. But to sing as well as that, knowing what she must, and to such company had required an immense strength of will.
When she found them, and the introductions had been made, she said softly and regretfully, ‘Tshaya would have sung it far better than myself. Whereas I can only dream of living it, she has done so.’
It was a confession of sorts, a reason perhaps why Janwillem De Vries had gone back to the boyhood love of his gypsy days.
They sipped Tokay. The orchestra played more quietly – little tunes she called birdsongs, with improvised trills and flourishes the audience half listened to. Kohler confided what had happened. Oona and Giselle both said earnestly, ‘We saw him, mademoiselle.’ ‘He spoke to me,’ added Giselle. ‘He saved my baby from the force of the blast, my face, my eyes … By doing so, Oona saw him and understood enough to hit the floor before she was killed.’
Everything was going wrong. Janwillem had changed so much.
‘Three women,’ said Kohler. ‘Yourself, Gabrielle Arcuri and Suzanne-Cécilia Lemaire. Are there others?’
Was it to be a time of reckoning?
‘Tell me which of you lined up again and again until you knew exactly what the banking schedule of that ticket office was and where the combination to that safe had been written down.’
‘Which of us …? Please, Inspector, I don’t understand. It’s all a mistake.’
Verdammt! why must she be so difficult when surely she must know the end was near? ‘Look, which of you is hiding him, where’s he being hidden, and what’s his next target?’
It would do no good to lie and hadn’t Gabrielle said Herr Kohler could be trusted if necessary? ‘We … we don’t know where he is. None of us. He’s … he’s simply not co-operating.’
‘Gone off on his own, has he?’
‘Yes, and obviously with Tshaya, though this we did not anticipate and … and had had no inclination of. How could we have?’
He’d best get it clear. ‘But you met with him on the fourteenth when he arrived in Paris. How the hell did you even know he’d be on that train?’
‘We didn’t know anything, Inspector! Jani … The first I knew of his arrival was his knock at my door. He said … All right, he said he’d escaped to England in 1940 and that … that the British had parachuted him into France. Could I keep him for a day or two? That was all he’d ask. He was desperate. I couldn’t refuse. The whole thing was crazy. I’d our son to think of but … but Janwillem was already in the flat. I did not know who, if anyone, might have noticed him or if, by sending him away, his presence would not be fixed in memory. The concierge … Mon Dieu, that one’s a collaborator if ever there was one.’ She shrugged. ‘You see the dilemma I was in.’
She was all innocence. None of it was her fault. ‘So you kept him until …?’ asked Kohler, pleasantly enough for Giselle to be startled by his manner.
‘Until the late afternoon of the seventeenth.’ This wasn’t true, of course, thought Nana, but somehow she had to protect the others.
‘Then he must have seen your son.’
She would have to smile. ‘Yes … Yes, for the first time. He was very pleased. Our Jani was beside himself with delight. The father he had always heard about had at last come to see him. They played for hours. They …’
‘Forget it,’ snorted Kohler impatiently. ‘When we took you home from the Avia Club Gym you told my partner to ask De Vries, when we caught him, why he had tried to kill the son he had never seen.’
She touched her chest. ‘Did I?’
Kohler nodded curtly towards a far table she could see well enough. ‘Were those two couples at the dinner party the SS and their friends threw in your former villa on the night of the eleventh?’
He would only ask it of them if she didn’t tell him. ‘Yes.’
‘And you still don’t know who they are?’
‘Should I?’
Oona was staring at her wine and keeping very still; Giselle had swallowed tightly.
‘Then listen,’ said Kohler sadly. ‘The one with the cigarette in its ivory holder, the polished jackboots and the blue-eyed blonde with the overhang is Oberstleutnant Willi Löwenstein, head of Funkabwehr Paris and France; that’s radio counter-espionage in case you’re interested.’
‘And the one with the brunette?’ she managed, her voice faint.
‘Horst Uhrig, his Gestapo counterpart. They’re sizing you up, Mademoiselle Thélème, and that can only mean one thing. They’ve buried their petty jealousies and have agreed to work together. Now you tell me why?’
‘I … I don’t know.’
‘I think you do.’
The fire had long since gone to dust. At 4.40 a.m. and out of tobacco, St-Cyr quietly pulled on his overcoat and found his scarf and gloves.
Suzanne-Cécilia Lemaire slept in her chair with arms folded beneath her head on the table. Had she been emptied of her secrets? he wondered, and thought it far too unlikely.
But she had revealed that the house on the rue Poliveau had been essential for its closeness to the Jardin des Plantes, and had told him of the wireless transceiver she had built and had kept hidden in the zebra house.
Two messages had come in from London at 1.50 a.m. on the fifteenth. The first had dealt with the parents of Nanette Vernet, the child-heiress who had lost her friends in the Sandman murders. The second had dealt with the parachuting of the Gypsy into France near Tours on the night of the thirteenth, an untruth she was not yet aware of. But it was the delay between the messages – several seconds – and the signature of the sender that had troubled her enough to confess.
‘The first was very clear, fast and sure,’ she had said. ‘It was what I had become accustomed to, but the second was hesitant, then fast, then surer, the touch firmer at the last, you understand, but it left me thinking … ah! what can I say when they are only faint signals in the darkness of the night? I felt it different but the news it brought had to be conveyed to the others at once.’
She had packed everything away and had braved the curfew, had cycled to the Club Mirage to inform Gabrielle who had contacted Nana Thélème later that day, but by then, of course, all of them must have known De Vries was in town. Even now they were each hedging their bets and revealing only so much.
Three women and by association, Hermann and himself and, yes, Oona and Giselle. It was not good. Indeed, it was a disaster.
‘London’ had used the code name of Zebra. A coincidence perhaps, if one believed in such things.
Fate if one did not.
At 5 a.m. twenty-five degrees of frost was unkind, the rue Laurence-Savart glacial in its darkness. Kohler let the Citroën’s engine idle. Far up the street a faint blue pinprick revealed the workaday world had begun.
Verdammt! what was he to do? Disassociate himself from Louis? Sever a friendship that had begun in the late summer of 1940? Take the side of the Occupier no matter how wrong it felt?
‘Get out before it’s too late,’ he said, echoing the thoughts of many no doubt, for the war news wasn’t good. ‘Try for Spain. Giselle and Oona first and then myself. False papers, good ones. Money …?’ He had none but what was in his pocket. Like gypsies the world over, he had always spent when he had had it to spend.
‘Expenses,’ he said and thought to light up a last cigarette cadged from Nana, deciding instead to break it in half. ‘Louis will want a smoke. He always does. First thing.’
In spite of being from opposite sides of the war and old enemies at that, they had got on and they did work well together.
‘Too well,’ he confessed. ‘It has to
end. Berlin are telling me this. Boemelburg too. To them, it’s time for me to stand up and be counted.’
Like a cold wind from the Russian steppes, Herr Max had been sent to bring home the point, though it had yet to be stated. ‘It’s been a set-up ever since that son of a bitch let the Gypsy out of jail. He was aware the Gestapo had bugged Gabrielle’s dressing-room. He knew there was a clandestine wireless set sending signals from Paris and that the Gestapo’s Radio Listeners and the Abwehr’s had located it. What better, then, than to sweep them all into the net by playing a little Fimkspiel? A radio game. Answer the signals by feeding in a message the terrorists would want clearly to accept. But now Berlin must be crying for Engelmann’s head if he doesn’t get the bastard back and fast! And now the réseau must be tearing their collective hair and wondering what to do.’
8,600,000 francs in cash from the office safe at Cartier’s and never mind that it had been Gabrielie’s money; 682,000 francs from the Gare Saint-Lazare, to say nothing of what the General-major Wehrle had had in his safe at the Ritz and all the rest. It was enough to tempt a poor detective and to tear him from friendship. Giselle and Oona could buy a villa on the Costa del Sol. There’d be no need for that little shop or bar he’d been thinking about. Giselle could have her babies, Oona too, if she wanted. None of them need work another day. Diamonds and sapphires, gold coins and old stamps.
When Louis joined him, the Sûreté’s first words were, ‘Don’t even think of it, Hermann. Things have gone too far this time. They won’t let you escape to Spain.’
‘I didn’t think they would.’
‘Good. Boemelburg wants to see us at first light.’
‘That’s hours away. Hey, we can be in Tours by then if we hurry.’
‘The roads …’
‘Fuck the roads. There’s no traffic anyway. Hang on.’
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