Gypsy

by J. Robert Janes

  The brakes were hit. The Citroën slewed sideways. At about 90 kilometres an hour, it sped broadside towards the rear lorry. They did a complete circle. Another and another … ‘Hermann!’

  The car pulled out of its spin and they found themselves at the side of the road.

  ‘So, Louis, why not tell me what you found out, eh? Why keep me in suspense?’

  ‘The Resistance in Vouvray were to pass the Gypsy on to others once he had finished his work in Paris. De Vries will know of this, Hermann. Gabrielle will have told him of it.’

  ‘Then it’s even worse than we thought. The son of a bitch will turn them all in if he has to.’

  ‘And if not him, then Tshaya.’

  At Beaugency they stopped for the prix fixe of watery soup, sour wine, stuffed cabbage leaves but stuffed with what – more of the infamous ‘mystery’ meat? – and prunes aux vinaigre. There wasn’t a single one of the Occupier in the restaurant except for Hermann and there were stares from all others.

  At OrléBuilt on the right bans they headed north towards Paris, the meal not sitting well. Neither of them had any tobacco. Even their mégoi tins, where all cigarette butts, found or otherwise were kept, held only ashes.

  At a control, the car was flagged down and they had to go through the motions. Cartes d’identité were handed over, their laissez-passers and sauf-conduits. Cold stares from the burly Feldwebel in charge were received by the Sûreté. Always there was this little panic, this fluttering of the heart only more so now.

  But it didn’t happen. Louis wasn’t asked to get out, and soon they were on their way again, Kohler heaving a sigh of relief. ‘Berlin must be tearing their hair,’ he said.

  ‘Himmler’s, I think, and Herr Max’s.’

  ‘Boemelburg’s too.’ Kohler floored the car as they passed a farm wagon that was driven by an old woman whose black shawl was suddenly caught by the wind. ‘Nana must have hoped and prayed De Vries had escaped to England in 1940, Louis. The Norwegians let a lot of prisoners go just before the Defeat. She would have been ready to believe he’d been parachuted into France, but even so, would have been surprised to learn he had arrived on her doorstep to do the very thing they wanted.’

  Had they asked specifically for him? they both wondered, but thought it doubtful if for no other reason than security. Instead, they must have asked simply for help and then found an expert had been sent.

  Wind-drift was carrying the snow across a ploughed field. Sunlight, rare for this time of year, was breaking through the clouds to be caught among the crystals …

  ‘If De Vries is now having to get his nitro from dynamite, Louis, then how much of it did those three women find for him? Berlin and Herr Max wouldn’t have given him any, no matter what they fed them by wireless, so don’t start thinking they did.’

  ‘But does Herr Max know for certain it’s them, Hermann, or does he only suspect it is?’

  The airwaves, the distance factor, the difficulties of pinning a transceiver down. Was there still a particle of hope or was all lost?

  Built on the right bank of the Nonette and surrounded by a plain that was bordered by forests now shrouded in snow, Senlis was about fifty kilometres to the north-north-east beyond Paris. It was a quiet provincial town whose soft grey limestone walls and substantial houses had lasting charm. But it was from this southernmost apex that the triangle known as the Devastated Region began.

  To the north, at Péronne in 1917, the British had found on the blackened shell of the mairie a signboard left by the Kaiser’s retreating army. Nicht ärgern, nur wundern. Do not be enraged, only wonder.

  The devastation had been deliberate and terrible. Thousands and thousands of fruit trees had been hacked off at exactly waist height and felled so that their crowns all pointed with mathematical preciseness along the path of the retreating army.

  The same had happened to the poplars and buttonwoods which had once beautified the lanes and roads. From Senlis to Saint Quentin in the north and to Albert in the west, had been affected but in reality the ruination of that war had been much greater. About fourteen hundred villages and towns had all but been obliterated.

  And in Senlis? It had been occupied from 2 September 1914 until the eleventh, during the initial push to the Marne. Here the invader had trodden relatively lightly, one might suppose, looting, burning and destroying all but four of the houses along the fabled rue du la République. Its mayor and six others had been executed, but fortunately much of the town had been spared.

  During the retreat, all wells and springs had been polluted with the carcasses of dead animals and latrine excrement, the farm buildings either burned or blown up and the roads dynamited.

  ‘It’s a wonder you speak to me at all,’ muttered Kohler, still behind the wheel.

  ‘Ah! it wasn’t of your doing.’ Hermann had been taken prisoner in 1916.

  ‘Right after the Armistice we were marched north and through Jussy, Louis. Not a Kaiser’s shell or one of yours had hit it but not a wall, a bush, flower or blade of grass had been left. Hell, it was only a little place. Why’d they do a thing like that?’

  Hermann must have seen the remains of the orchards, the farmboy in him overwhelmed. ‘In war all things are possible. Come on, let’s find the house of Monsieur Jacqmain’s mother. Let’s not dwell on ancient history.’

  ‘It was only twenty-five years ago and now we’re right back in the shit again.’

  The grey-stone house, with mullioned windows and white trim, was just off the rue de la Treille in the oldest part of town. Built largely in the eighteenth century, it was part seventeenth-century priory, part thirteenth-century chapel, and the two long storeys of it exuded tranquillity, substance and stability. But it was from the back that the treasure of the house was best seen even in winter. Here ivy-covered, high and ancient walls enclosed a large garden with sturdy walnut trees and several venerable apple trees. The remains of the chapel were at the rear of the house where moss-covered stone steps led steeply up from beneath the apple bows, a good six metres to the top of the Gallo-Roman wall that had once surrounded the town.

  ‘Silvanectum, Hermann. Home of the Silvanectes. There were once twenty-eight towers along this wall, but now only sixteen are left.’

  Trying to momentarily forget their problems, Louis added, ‘If ever I could move out of that house of my mother’s, this is what I would aspire to.’

  Kohler had heard it all before. The little retirement with government pension, the farm in Provence where vegetables might be harvested if sufficient water could possibly be secured; the orchard in Normandy not ravaged by cutworms, blight, frost, starlings, war or thieves, namely tax collectors. ‘It doesn’t look as if there’s anyone around.’

  They descended the steps. Louis slipped and nearly went down. Kohler cursed the impulse that had led them to explore the place from such an entrance. At the back door, repeated banging brought no answer. All the curtains were drawn. ‘Merde, what now?’ muttered Louis.

  ‘We open it up. We have to. Look, for all we know Boemelburg and Herr Max could have had everyone arrested and be only waiting for us to return to Paris.’

  ‘Idiot, they’d have stopped us on the road. You’re forgetting the controls.’

  Kohler tried to force the lock. ‘Messieurs …’

  The voice had about it a breathless urgency. At the far corner of the garden, a top step was hesitantly negotiated by a wooden-clogged, tall, thin woman in black with a shopping hamper. A hand was thrown up. They held their breaths. ‘Madame Jacqmain is in her grave these fifteen days,’ she cried out. ‘The Mademoiselle has gone to Paris. You … why would such as you demand such as this effort from one such as myself?’

  They recrossed the garden at a run and when these two from Paris who had come in the shiny black car that had been left outside the mairie and Kommandantur stood below her on the steps, Madame Augustine Moreel faced them from above, thus blocking their way and putting even the giant at a disadvantage. ‘Messieurs, must I
notify the préfet himself? You were tampering with the locks.’

  A Belgian, a Walloon … ‘Madame, could we not discuss things on more stable ground?’

  Suspicion raked him. ‘Please state your business.’

  Her purse was black and gripped as a weapon. ‘Sûreté and Kripo. He’s the Sûreté, I’m the …’

  Her grey-blue eyes flashed impatience. ‘What’s the son done this time? Violated another poor young thing? Flayed her to satiate his base desires and then wept on his knees before that portrait of his dear mother, a saint?’

  They waited. They swallowed this outburst, these two detectives who clung to the icy ascent beneath her.

  ‘Well?’ she demanded.

  Louis was about to say, A few small questions. Kohler shushed him by gripping him by the elbow and nearly sending the two of them to the bottom. ‘You mentioned a mademoiselle, madame?’

  ‘Perhaps I did.’

  ‘There were two ladies who came from Paris. Did they have a suitcase with them?’ tried Louis.

  ‘When, exactly, did they come?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s what we’d like to know,’ managed Kohler.

  ‘A suitcase,’ she said, the breath held back. ‘Travellers always have such things.’

  Merde! they were getting nowhere. ‘Madame, please step aside and accompany us into the house.’

  ‘I’ll do no such thing. Madame trusted me implicitly and carried her confidence in that trust to her grave.’

  A treasure, then, if the key to part this one’s lips could ever be found. ‘The two who came here, did they take Monsieur Jacqmain’s daughter to Paris with them?’ It was a complete shot in the dark.

  ‘Sylvianne was beside herself with grief, monsieur. The child has lived all her tender life with the grandmother she adored. They were the greatest of companions. No matter was too difficult for either to accomplish for the other. Reading, sketching, piano lessons … Night after night exquisite concerts, the singing … Though she’s only twelve years old, the daughter has the sound of angels in her voice and fingers, but also the great goodness of God in her heart, thanks be to Him who has made us all in spite of accidents of birth.’

  ‘You must be freezing,’ said Kohler. ‘Here, let’s go round and into the house by its proper entrance. It was stupid of us to have come this way. Undignified of police officers.’

  Suspicion registered but she held her tongue. An eighteenth-century iron railing ran atop the wall. There were the usual ‘tourists’ about, members, also, of the Wehrmacht’s local detachment, but the lack of schoolboys throwing snowballs at schoolgirls reminded one that the light of day was, alas, fast fading. Soon the kids would be let out of school.

  ‘Messieurs, why have you come?’

  It was Louis who said, ‘He has killed himself.’

  She drew in a breath. ‘Then you will want to know where his daughter is. Two deaths in such a short time … It will be hard for Sylvianne to bear. In spite of everything, that goodness of heart included the father she had never seen except in photographs faded by the rays of the tropical sun.’

  ‘Who was the mother?’

  Why were they so anxious? ‘One whose skin was that of a mulatto. A gypsy. A “virgin” he took repeatedly in a brothel in Bruges and once beat so terribly with his whip, it brought the police, thereby disgracing his mother in the eyes of her family and friends, while leaving her with the constant reminder of the child that was given to her at birth by the madam of that house.’

  Tshaya’s child … ‘A saint, you said,’ offered St-Cyr kindly.

  ‘Now, please, let us go in before the neighbours think I’ve been arrested and that the house will fall into the hands of the son they know nothing of but whispers.’

  The house was pleasant, the kitchen spacious beneath a wealth of ancient beams from which, by some avoidance of the ordinance for copper, scrap and otherwise, the pots still hung. There was a large and blackened, grey, cut-stone fireplace in which a small fire soon burned. Clearly Jacqmain’s daughter had been in charge of collecting twigs and branches, but it was when he went to get some of the fist-sized balls of drying papier-mâché she had made, that St-Cyr found the half used-up novel.

  ‘Nana,’ he said. ‘Why did I not think of it?’

  Zola’s novel of the courtesan, ‘actress’ and ‘singer’ of no talent but one, had captured readers ever since its publication in 1880. A tall and stunningly curvaceous creature with reddish-blonde hair. Nana had suddenly appeared on stage at the Variétés in the operetta, La Vénus blonde. At the age of eighteen she had had no qualms. Her breasts had been firm, the nipples erect beneath the flimsy, diaphanous veil she had worn with nothing else. In triumph, she had lain in the grotto of the silver mine on Mount Etna, its walls serving as polished mirrors to her nakedness. Through their opera glasses, the bankers, financiers, stock brokers and demi-mondaines of fashionable Paris had even seen the tawny hair of her armpits and her radiant, if wickedly lecherous smile.

  She had known all about men and had known exactly what they had wanted of her. But her young life, after unbelievable riches had been heaped upon her, had ended in smallpox and he could still recall the scent of carbolic that had permeated the death-bed room at the Hôtel Grand on her return from Russia. Only her hair had retained its radiance but Zola had given a last glimpse of it in candlelight. Touched by a chance gust, some strands had fallen forward to be glued to the sores.

  Within six months of the novel’s end, Bismark’s Prussians had marched into Paris. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 had ended and the German state had begun.

  ‘Nana Thélème,’ he said when Hermann came to find out what was delaying him. ‘It’s the stage name our Nana chose and the daughter here must have known of it. Hence her reading the novel, in secret no doubt.’

  ‘I made her burn that book,’ said Madame Moreel. ‘The child adored Mademoiselle Thélème who, before the Defeat, would come to visit us as often as she could and delighted in this house and in the child. It was through her that Sylvianne took up the piano, the singing and dancing.’

  ‘Is Sylvianne the reason Monsieur Jacqmain sold his diamonds and sent that suitcase?’ asked Kohler only to hear Louis interjecting. ‘A moment, mon vieux.

  ‘Madame, this friend of the child’s father, did she sometimes bring along another? A Dutchman? Tall, thin, about …’

  ‘Why is it, please, that you ask, Inspector?’

  The coldness of suspicion had leapt into her eyes. ‘Only to give us background. It’s always best to explore all avenues.’

  All branches of the tree – was this what he was implying? she wondered anxiously. ‘They adored Sylvianne. The child was very fond of Mademoiselle Thélème’s friend, but he did not come here often, nor did she explain his long absences beyond that she did not know where he was. What passed between our Nana and her “Jani”, Inspector? Love – ah! even an old widow such as myself could see it. But why did he not marry her?’

  ‘The suitcase,’ said Kohler brusquely.

  ‘The money was to ensure that Sylvianne and her grandmother should want for nothing, but I couldn’t have that father of hers suddenly coming into her life. It was Madame Jacqmain’s most fervent wish that her son never see his daughter or take any part in her life. When she died, after a long illness, I had to see that these wishes were carried out and let them take the child and the suitcase to Paris, but now that he is dead, Sylvianne can return. His suicide is as if God had answered all our prayers.’

  Fearing she had said too much, the woman gathered an apronful of the papier-mâché balls and, clutching the last of the novel, went back to the fire.

  ‘Was the daughter even Jacqmain’s?’ grunted Kohler, pulling down a lower eyelid at the vagaries of whorehouses and the paternity of such offspring.

  ‘Tshaya must have been banished from the kumpania and from the Rom for ever, Hermann. She’d have left the child with them otherwise. But if De Vries was the father, that could well be why he came he
re and why Nana took such an interest in the child.’

  ‘What about the nitro? Could he have come to tap a little of it from time to time in the thirties?’

  ‘Perhaps – its certainly worth considering.’

  ‘And the Thélème part of her stage name?’ asked Kohler, his mind still on the explosives.

  ‘It’s from Rabelais’s magnificent satire of 1534. He believed that humanity held within itself a basic instinct to do what was right, if all his conditions of being free and well-bred, properly educated and of good company were met. There was a war in which all the priests but one sought refuge in prayer while their lonely brother took on all comers in the abbey close and drove the enemy from it. To celebrate the victory, an abbey was built whose only rule was “Do what thou wilt”. L’Abbaye de Thélème.’

  ‘Another maison de tolérance!’ snorted Kohler.

  ‘Not so. A place where all good things might be enjoyed, yes! but goodness being defined and governed by that fundamental instinct in us all. You should read more, Hermann. You really must introduce yourself to our literature.’

  ‘Okay, I get the message. Hey, I would never have let you down. You know that, Louis. We’re in this together.’

  They had no tobacco. They could only share a handshake.

  ‘Madame,’ said Louis gently when they had returned to the kitchen, ‘was Sylvianne’s mother Lucie-Marie Doucette?’

  The woman was instantly suspicious. ‘If so, she did not call herself that. Her name, and the only one she went by, was Tshaya. Myself, I saw her only once and what I saw, I did not trust, but Madame was determined to make amends by adopting the child, and I am for ever grateful that she did.’

  Louis nodded sagaciously. Onions were being peeled for the soup that would be her supper. ‘And was Mademoiselle Thélème aware of the mother’s name?’

  Was she familiar with Tshaya – is this what they were after, these two? ‘Madame confided it to her just as Mademoiselle Thélème brought news of Madame’s son she then imparted in confidence.’

  ‘And when, please, did these visits begin?’ said St-Cyr.