Gypsy

by J. Robert Janes

  How could he say this to him? How could he? demanded Boemelburg silently. With great deliberation the quartier de l’Europe was outlined in more red crayon on the wall map behind the desk. Sector by sector the city was being searched.

  ‘Very well, see that it’s taken care of but first, Herr Max would like to sit in while you question the Arcuri woman.’

  ‘Then let us do that at the villa. Let her have some clean clothes and a little warmth.’

  ‘Don’t try to save her, Louis. You do that and you and Kohler will go down with her.’

  It was the end for them. Kohler saw Louis bring Gabrielle up from the cellars. Christ! what had they done to her? He hurried along the corridor to catch up with them but Louis signalled otherwise and soon Herr Max had joined them and they were getting into a car.

  There was no hope. They were for it. Abwehr and Gestapo Paris listeners would raid the zebra house and find the wireless set and that would be it. Proof positive.

  He took a breath. He tried to still his racing pulse. He said, ‘At least I can tidy things up here. At least I can do that for Louis.’

  The sound room was unattended. Pick-up spools turned constantly but there were no films here now, no projectors …

  Kohler ran up the stairs and along a corridor. He took another set of stairs, sent a shower of reports from the arms of a Blitzmädel, and barged through the door whose hammered Gothic letters told the world this was the ARCHIV of Gestapo Paris-Central.

  Morning coffee and a little tête-à-tête were disturbed. A hand was glued to a silk-stockinged knee …

  ‘The films of Marianne St-Cyr and the Hauptmann Steiner. Vite, vite, imbécile. Von Schaumburg is demanding them again and this time it’s final.’

  The parasite behind the desk removed his hand. The secretary, all of forty-seven and straight from the cowsheds of Saxony, hesitantly tidied her bleached blonde hair and grey skirt.

  ‘It’s all right, Ursula. Leave me to deal with this one. Come back later and we’ll finish our conference.’

  ‘Conference …? Verdammt! The Chief had better clean up this little nest. Fornicating, were you, behind the shelves?’

  Her cheeks grew red, her painted lips began to quiver.

  Kohler ignored her and leaned on the desk she had vacated. ‘Your boss is becoming too territorial,’ he said darkly of Turcotte in Records. ‘This used to be Glotz’s domain until he was sent to Kiev to face the partisans, at Old Shatter Hand’s insistence. Now give me the films, all six copies, and all others.’ Fingers were snapped.

  This was Kohler of the Kripo, Kohler of the whip-scars, the prostitute Giselle le Roy and the Dutch alien, Oona van der Lynn. Two superb pieces of ass and one of them up the stump. ‘Copies, Inspector? What copies, please?’

  ‘I’m waiting,’ breathed Kohler.

  ‘Then wait. Produce the pink slip signed by Directeur Turcotte and I will carry out his instructions to the letter!’

  Ah Gott im Himmel, this idiot was but one of the occupied!

  The Walther P38 was taken out and lain on the desk with its muzzle pointing the right way.

  ‘Accidents …’ managed the custodian, swallowing tightly as he stared at that thing.

  ‘They happen all too often in wartime. I’ve tried my damnedest to get our armourer to fix the safety on that weapon but you know how things are.’

  A Gauloise bleue was hesitantly fingered but quickly set aside. ‘Two copies were sent to Berlin. Don’t ask me to whom. It was before my time.’

  The lying son of a bitch! ‘Hey, Gaspard – that is your name in bronze, isn’t it, and bronze is needed in the Reich? – you’d better tell me or I’ll help myself to your cigarettes and say the accident happened as you were taking them out of your jacket pocket. Everyone here knows too much benzedrine has made me jumpy. Everyone will tell that to your wife and kids at the funeral.’

  ‘Herr Goebbels. He and … and Herr Himmler expressed an interest in viewing the films, as did Gestapo Mueller.’

  Pour Louis, poor Marianne. Nothing could be done about the copies in Berlin. Uncoiling canister after canister, Kohler struck a match. ‘Idiot!’ cried the custodian, darting for the metal waste basket in which to catch the ashes, such as they were.

  ‘Now get me the negative, or whatever it’s called. We wouldn’t want to leave temptation up there on that shelf.’

  Marianne had been a Breton. Blonde, blue-eyed and a lot younger than Louis, she’d had a gorgeous figure and yes, she had succumbed to that little love affair, had been so lonely. But all such things must come to an end. Even Giselle and Oona? he asked himself, and yanking a final spool from a waiting projector, pulled out its leader to hold the film to the light and sadly shake his head. ‘Gaspard, what’s become of this once proud nation of yours? Such dishonesty can only bring its own reward.’

  He made the bastard torch the last copy and, with the pistol pointed at his head, swear there were no others. It felt good to burn the bridges down behind himself, terrific to be rid of those films. Everyone would be thoroughly pissed off but now if only he could find Louis a bottle of pastis, a last present before the firing squad, a tin of pipe tobacco too …

  ‘Oeufs à la Duchesse,’ whispered Gabrielle, tears starting from her for it was the simple things in life one valued most and this … why this meal had far exceeded her modest request. ‘Poached eggs on little rafts of potato cakes which have been baked a golden brown,’ she said in fluent deutsch. ‘The whole to receive its delicate rain of veal stock and butter. Oh Mein Gott, Jean-Louis, I …’

  Bathed and wearing pyjamas and a pale blue silk dressing-down, her hair put up in a towel, she looked much better, thought St-Cyr. But at no time could he warn her that Herr Max had let the Gypsy out of jail and that what she and the others had thought was London answering at the last, had also been a Funkspiel, a Gestapo Mausefalle, a souricière. ‘Eat,’ he urged. ‘The questions can wait.’

  ‘No they can’t! snapped Herr Max. Boemelburg had obviously been afraid of offending too many, and Berlin, who should have known better, had reluctantly agreed that she should be brought here. ‘We haven’t time. Too much is at stake.’

  ‘Of course, but as one experienced detective to another, might I not gauge when the moment to begin is appropriate?’

  ‘Gestapo Mueller will hear of this! I’ve got you and Kohler pegged, so don’t forget it!’

  ‘We could hardly do so.’

  Jean-Louis sat down and took up the procès-verbal she had given and had signed on Thursday afternoon at the Invalides Commissariat de police on the rue de Bourgogne. Gabrielle started to eat – she would have to, she told herself. The room grew quiet. The one from Berlin lighted a cheroot but did not take his eyes from her. What was he thinking? she wondered. How much does he really know?

  The Neuilly villa at the corner of the avenue Victor Hugo and the rue de Rouvray was reserved only for the most special of suspects. Surrounded by a tall fence of Louis XIV ironwork, and behind a facade of substantial pillars, its ten bedrooms, three salons, library, office, billiards- and dining-rooms came complete with a cook and his two daughters who doubled as kitchen help and chamber-maids.

  A kitchen garden behind the house and a spacious lawn, with chestnut, lime and fruit trees and shrubs all round, gave ample privacy even in winter. There were guards but these were unobtrusive. ‘Guests’ were allowed an hour’s walk out of doors and at times could even meet informally. Like the eggs, thought Engelmann bitterly, they were treated with the greatest of respect so as not to offend their respective powers that be but would such a courtesy make any difference to this one who so delicately sipped her Moselblümchen?

  He thought not. ‘Berlin are demanding answers,’ he said, curtly flicking ash aside.

  She set her knife and fork down and dabbed at her lips with the napkin. ‘I would not have willingly reported the theft of those explosives had I been a terrorist. My car, yes – yes, of course I could have told the police only that it had been stolen. But
I didn’t, did I, Herr Engelmann? And I can assure you, I thought most definitely I would soon be dead.’

  ‘A pretty speech. The Gypsy tries to kill Kohler and St-Cyr. He leaves their booby-trapped auto directly below your friend’s flat yet he lets you go?’

  ‘Herr Max …’

  ‘VERDAMMT! How dare you interrupt me?’

  ‘He … he said he had no quarrel with me, that I … I had been of great service to the … the cause.’

  ‘The cause?’

  ‘That … that is correct.’

  Fists were clenched. The grey-blue little eyes darted hatred at her. ‘Herr Max,’ interjected St-Cyr. ‘Her statement of the twenty-first is very clear on the matter. Six terrorists …’

  ‘Then bitte, meine französische Büroklammer, ask her how the hell she knew of the quarry’s location in the first place?’

  ‘I didn’t! He told me where it was. I’d never been there before. Me? How could you even think a woman such as myself would visit a place like that or even know of it?’

  Verdammt, the bitch! ‘He came to the Club Mirage and entered via the courtyard?’ seethed Engelmann.

  She swallowed hard. ‘Yes, at just after the curfew had ended. I … I was preparing to leave for home. It’s all in my statement.’

  ‘Mein Schatz, I want what isn’t in your statement.’

  A little too quickly Gabrielle said, ‘Someone must have told him where I worked and that I had the use of a car.’

  Not the Thélème woman and not the veterinary surgeon, but some as yet unknown person! snorted Engelmann inwardly.

  His tie was yanked down. The buttons of his blue serge waistcoat were undone, the jacket removed. Ah nom de Jésus-Christ! thought St-Cyr.

  ‘So,’ breathed Engelmann softly, ‘a man who can steal an ambulance at will, and who can move from robbery to robbery with complete assurance, suddenly finds it necessary to have you as a driver? Surely, Fräulein, it was the Thélème woman who told him of you? At least let us have the benefit of knowing that much?’

  ‘She … she hasn’t seen him since before the birth of their son. You … you must know this as well as myself. You have questioned her, haven’t you?’

  Alarmed, Jean-Louis was about to intervene. Was there no way she could stop him?

  ‘And Tshaya, his woman?’ breathed Engelmann. ‘Was she not with him when you drove the Gypsy to Senlis to get the explosives?’

  She would have to eat a little to calm Jean-Louis. ‘Blame me if you wish, but I will not hide the truth. He said she was not well. The flu, I think.’ She took another bite.

  ‘And he forced you to drive him at what? Gunpoint?’

  ‘Yes. Tshaya had told him of the quarry. A client of hers, a prospector, had told her where his explosives were kept.’

  It was all lies, thought St-Cyr. More and more of them were being piled up yet she seemed unaware of this.

  She was tall and statuesque, said Engelmann to himself, and at the Club Mirage the troops avidly listened to her, but that could so easily be a screen behind which to hide a Terroristin. ‘Was that where he got the dynamite he boiled at the house on the rue Poliveau?’

  Her lovely eyes widened with innocence. ‘It must have been.’

  ‘But you didn’t drive him to the quarry that time.’

  ‘No. No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Yet he must have got at least a case of dynamite then.’

  She shrugged. Her napkin fell to the floor and as she bent to retrieve it, she said, ‘Perhaps, but I really wouldn’t know.’

  Ah mon Dieu, mon Dieu … swore St-Cyr silently, it was coming now. Herr Max would grab her by the hair. He’d bring the glowing end of that cheroot to her face and what will I do? he demanded. Kill him quickly. I’ll have to.

  ‘Senlis,’ muttered Engelmann. ‘You and Nana Thélème went there on the thirteenth, a day before De Vries arrived in Paris. You dropped into the Luftwaffe base near Conflans-Sainte-Honorine for lunch – it’s all on record – and were given a tour of the clubhouse and aerodrome.’

  Ah non! panicked St-Cyr. Gabrielle said nothing. She just seemed to tighten up. A hand was lightly pressed to her stomach. ‘A concert,’ she said at last but it was clear she was afraid. ‘A benefit Nana and I are to give on the thirtieth. We … we were asked there by the commanding officer of the base, the Oberst-leutnant Ritter Koenen. Could we have refused his very kind invitation?’

  Paris’s venerable yacht club, the Cercle Violier, had a rambling old clubhouse, some eighty guest cabins and a fabulous collection of wooden scale models, the original mock-ups of famous racing yachts, and a fortune in silver cups. But had Suzanne-Cécilia sent over information of that base to London? worried St-Cyr, concluding sadly that she must have and that Herr Max had simply been confirming what the Gestapo’s and the Abwehr’s listeners had told him.

  ‘We went on to Senlis to visit the mother of Monsieur Jacqmain, only to find she had passed away. On our return, we brought the prospector’s daughter to Paris. She’s staying with Nana while we see if it is possible for her to remain in the city. The General von Schaumburg has most kindly agreed to intercede on her behalf.’

  ‘So, two trips to Senlis after all,’ grunted Engelmann. ‘One with the Fräulein Thélème on the thirteenth, and the other with the Gypsy yesterday morning.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you knew nothing of Janwillem De Vries until he forced you to drive him to that quarry?’

  ‘No, that is incorrect. Nana had told me of him but I had not met him until then.’

  More lies, thought St-Cyr grimly. Gabrielle had to have met De Vries when he arrived in Paris on the fourteenth. She must have given him details of Cartier’s for the robbery on the night of the eighteenth. And what of the schedule at the Gare Saint-Lazare’s ticket office? he wondered bleakly. She must have stood in line to get details of that safe and the deposits, or had it been Suzanne-Cécilia or Nana, or all three of them? The same, too, for the pay-train.

  Herr Max continued to study her in silence, she to resist all urge to move only to suddenly break and abruptly get up to look out of the windows and down into the kitchen garden.

  Jean-Louis will die, she said to herself. Hermann will die – all of us – but I cannot give in. I must not break. Everything had seemed so straightforward. The Gypsy was to have been taken to Château Thériault once he had finished the targets they had lined up for him in Paris, but the réseau had been plunged into something they had not anticipated in the slightest and Janwillem De Vries had left them totally out in the cold.

  ‘Reinforced interrogations, Fräulein,’ said Herr Max. ‘Those are used only when all else fails.’

  She didn’t flinch.

  ‘Herr Max, a moment,’ interjected St-Cyr. ‘A handkerchief was dropped in the powder magazine as a warning to us. Clearly Fräulein Arcuri felt she would not survive the trip.’

  ‘The Gypsy’s mad – insane,’ she said, turning to angrily face them. ‘He said he was going to leave me there for Jean-Louis and Hermann to find, that he wanted to kill them. “Those two,” he said. ‘They’re the only ones I have to fear. The others are nothing.” He … he had been told to be especially wary of them, I think, and … and yes, to kill them.’

  Her eyes were wiped with the corner of a sleeve. ‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘You see the state I’m in. He was very definite about what he wanted and, in spite of the powerful smell from the dynamite – I was soon sick at my stomach and had to go outside – he forced me to help him. Explosives, Herr Engelmann! Nitroglycerine! A woman!’

  ‘Yes, yes, but did he give any hint of his plans?’

  ‘His plans?’ she shrilled in despair and tossed her hands. ‘The Kommandantur perhaps? The Opéra during a performance, since so many of the seats are taken up by members of the Reich. The rue des Saussaies itself … Who knows really what he and his friends will do?’

  ‘The “friends”. Describe them please.’

  ‘It’s … it’s all written down there, i
s it not?’ She pointed to her statement only to hear him snort and brutally say, ‘just tell us.’

  Momentarily she shut her eyes to squeeze the tears from them, then blurted, ‘All right. Though they wore bandannas, I … I did see something I forgot to write down. They were swarthy. Their skin was like those of the Midi so at the time I thought nothing of it, you understand, but now must think they … they were gypsies.’

  ‘There aren’t any of them left. They’ve all been deported.’

  ‘Not all. Tshaya wasn’t. There … there is another thing, though I’m certain he told them not to speak Romani, one let slip the word Gaje.’

  ‘Six terrorists,’ muttered Engelmann.

  ‘But others, perhaps. Ah! I had forgotten. They did speak of piano concerts and that they would have to move their piano to another location and quickly. This has puzzled me greatly, as a singer, you understand.’

  ‘Their piano,’ said Engelmann darkly, and getting up, he started for her.

  ‘Their wireless transceiver!’ interjected St-Cyr. ‘It’s terrorist talk. We … we had best warn the Sturmbannführer, otherwise the …’

  The raid, Jean-Louis? Is this what you were about to say? wondered Gabrielle, sickened by the thought.

  ‘The telephone?’ demanded Engelmann.

  ‘Downstairs in the Sturmbannführer’s study,’ said St-Cyr. ‘There’s another in the corridor.’

  Engelmann motioned for Jean-Louis to leave and once the two of them were out in the hall, he closed the door and Gabrielle heard him lock it.

  A raid … Suzanne-Cécilia, she silently pleaded, be brave, ma chère. Do it because you have to! You must!

  And biting her knuckles to stop herself from completely going to pieces, sat down heavily to await the end.

  The raid on the wireless set had been moved up. Kohler had been taken along. Helplessly he watched as Suzanne-Cécilia Lemaire tried to make a run for it. Others scattered in the Jardin des Plantes, others shrieked. Shots were fired.