He knew he was arguing with himself, knew also that Boemelburg would have his own suspicions. Walter would have sensed doubt in him. Walter would have begun to question the murder.
*
Subdued, terrified – pulled from a fitful sleep at 0347 hours – Gabrielle stared emptily at the cognac in her glass. She knew she must say something, that they had to have answers.
‘Drink it!’ said Boemelburg using French.
Anger flared. ‘Why should I? I don’t want it! I want a robe – something to cover these … these pyjamas which are not my own.’
A hand was raised. She wouldn’t duck. She would take the blow and rebound from it.
The hand was halted in mid-air.
‘Now drink it,’ grunted Boemelburg.
The cognac was the Vieille Réserve. Was he certain it would make her sick? ‘We didn’t kill the Spade, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ she said ashenly. ‘We had no reason to. I’ve never met him. Tshaya …’
‘How could she have tied him down like that if alone?’ demanded Engelmann in deutsch.
An irritated shrug was all she would offer.
‘The Gypsy wasn’t with her. He was in hiding, was he not?’ said Boemelburg quietly.
Ah damn him. ‘I don’t know. How could I?’ she winced.
Her throat constricted. ‘The Spade was useful to us,’ said Boemelburg, reverting to French, ‘but now that he’s gone, you and the others are our only leads.’
‘Then bring us all together, Sturmbannführer. Let us tell you what we know. We’ll help you in any way we can,’ she pleaded.
‘Where were you last Wednesday night?’ he asked flatly.
Herr Engelmann was incensed at the continued use of French. ‘I … I was at the Club Mirage.’
‘And during your breaks?’ asked Boemelburg.
‘In my dressing-room. Your … your Listeners should have a record of it.’
‘Those tapes are mostly silent.’
‘Then please ask the Rivard brothers, the owners. I did not leave until after the curfew had ended at five on Thursday morning as you well know.’
‘The explosives …’
‘She’s lying,’ said Engelmann in deutsch. ‘There were no other terrorists. She went willingly with De Vries to the quarry.’
‘Bitte, ja? Herr Max. I wish to get a sense of things. You will have your chance with her, never fear.’
‘There … there were six of them, Sturmbannführer, and I am certain one of the three who came with us mentioned a campsite in a forest, at some ruins. I swear it. I wouldn’t lie to you. There … there is too much for me to lose.’
‘The Château Thériault and your son.’
‘Yes.’
More cognac was called for and again she found herself staring at it and unable to lift her eyes to him.
‘Did he scream?’ asked Boemelburg.
She leapt. Her drink was spilled. ‘He … he must have,’ she blurted, forcing herself not to burst into tears. ‘The … the rabbits shriek when blinded. It’s a despicable practice and, yes, I’ve seen it done.’
Ah Sweet Jésus, save her now, she thought, quickly draining the refill he had given her.
‘Why will you not co-operate?’ he asked. ‘I don’t want to see you hurt, Mademoiselle Arcuri. The people who do those things are not nice.’
She tried to speak but couldn’t. Furious with her, he told Engelmann to bring the veterinarian. ‘You, go and sit on the bed and keep silent.’
Pale and badly shaken, Suzanne-Cécilia was hustled into the room and thrown into the chair. Terrified, she tried to make herself as small as possible but they shone the light on her. The nightgown she wore was thin and someone else’s. Wounded, her dark brown eyes lifted furtively to them only to duck away as she was struck once, twice, three times, not knowing what had been said to them, not even knowing if she had been betrayed.
The thick auburn hair was dishevelled. The long lashes and perfect eyebrows were knitted as she cringed in pain, Gabrielle realizing in that moment that Céci had earlier worn Marianne St-Cyr’s clothes and that they had fitted her perfectly.
It was a silly thought and such jealousy had no meaning here.
‘Je suit partout, madame,’ said Boemelburg quietly.
‘Oui?’ she blurted, blood trickling down her chin, the fear in her wounded eyes all too clear.
‘At 1630 hours Thursday a woman telephoned them to report that she had “information on the whereabouts of the estranged wife of Henri Doucette”.’
‘And?’ she asked, biting off the word.
‘Did you or did you not give them the address they then printed?’
She sucked in a breath and wiped the tears from her eyes. ‘“Estranged”, it’s a big word for an anonymous informer to use.’
Verdammt! he’d have to cut to where it would hurt. ‘Your husband, madame?’
‘My dead husband, yes?’ she blurted in tears.
‘Your wireless code was similar to that of his unit during the invasion. It was modified but followed the pattern of those advocated by Delastelle.’
Ah no, the book … ‘Honoré told me very little about his life in the army. If his code, or one like it was being used by whomever hid that wireless set in my zebra house – and I’m not saying there was a wireless set there – I … why I know nothing of it. How could I?’ She wiped blood from her lips and nose with the back of a hand that trembled. Smarting, she blinked her eyes to clear them but could not seem to stop herself from shaking.
Engelmann passed in front of the lamp to throw his shadow over her. Then he stepped behind her and she had to ask herself what was he going to do now?
‘Your student days,’ breathed Boemelburg. ‘One of your professors mentions “a remarkable ability with electronics”.’
‘I …’ she began, only to flinch as she felt Herr Engelmann’s hands brush the back of her neck. ‘I was young. I was interested in everything. It … it was just something to do.’ She shook him off.
‘But when asked, the professor was quite convinced you could have built a wireless set and would have had no trouble in operating it. “As a student, Madame Lemaire belonged to a group we called the Cricket Talkers, the Society for the Improvement of Wireless Transmission.”’
‘But … but why would he have referred to me as Madame when I was to him unmarried at the time?’
Tears were blinked away. Verdammt! why would she not confess without the use of reinforced interrogation? ‘The questioner gave him your married name,’ snapped Boemelburg gruffly.
‘Then he should have used Carrière, Sturmbannführer. My father is a pharmacist, a gold medallist, as is my mother. This professor you speak of did not know me. If he had, he would have shaken his head in despair at the memory of all my questions, and would have referred to me as Céci or la petite espiègle.’
The little imp! Furious with her, Boemelburg grabbed the front of her nightgown and, bunching it up, shoved his fist under her chin so that she was pushed back into Herr Engelmann. ‘Bring the other one!’ he shrieked.
The left side of Nana’s face was very red and swollen. Her lips were bleeding again. The bruises on her neck were darker, bigger. Violently she was thrown into the light. The nightgown had been torn and hung by a single shoulder strap. She’d been banged up against a wall and had been struck repeatedly.
‘I’m your only link,’ she hissed, yanking herself free of Engelmann. ‘I may even know where Janwillem is hiding, but as long as I live I will tell you nothing!’
Ah nom de Dieu, winced Gabrielle.
‘Leave us. Get out!’ he shouted in deutsch at Engelmann, and when the door was closed, took a moment to study these three. Everything in him said that things were not as they should be. The wireless signals, the Gypsy, the robberies, each of which must have been well surveyed beforehand. The murder of the Spade … the death of Hans Wehrle … Berlin were demanding an end to things. Himmler had taken a personal interest and had been shrieking for
blood.
Calming himself, Boemelburg indicated they should sit together on one of the couches. Cursing them silently, he gave them each some of the cognac. ‘Now tell me’, he breathed, ‘where Dr Vries and his woman are hiding. Do it, damn you, or I swear I will have you taken from this house and given over to those who would like nothing better than to strip you naked and beat you until the answers gurgle from your battered lips and punctured lungs.’
Ah Jésus … ‘If … if we knew …’ began Suzanne-Cécilia only to feel Gabrielle’s warning hand on her arm.
‘Nana …’ Gabrielle tried to find her voice. ‘When … when Janwillem left you in the spring of 1938 you had just discovered you were pregnant. Do you remember we met at the Café de la Paix? You were so upset, chérie. You thought Tshaya must have come back into his life and that he was staying with her father’s kumpania. A woods to the west of Paris, some ruins – I think you said it was at an old monastery, or what was left of one.’
Nana stared at her cognac and tilted the glass to let some of it run over her fingers, but if she thought the Vieille Réserve a deliberate reminder of the Spade’s murder, she gave no indication of this.
She bathed her lips and indicated Céci should do the same.
‘That … that was all I knew at the time,’ she said. ‘A place the gypsies had been going to for centuries but one, yes, that the Deuxiéme bureau des nomades knew nothing of.’
There, she would let this Gestapo pig digest the crumb she had given him.
His watery blue eyes sought her out. ‘Are we to search every woods to the west of the city?’ he asked blandly.
‘Only those with ruins,’ she countered swiftly. ‘I don’t like being hit, Sturmbannführer, nor having my nightclothes ripped from me, nor do I like being nearly drowned when a few sensible questions calmly given are all that is necessary. Janwillem is not himself, not any more, but your people and the Norwegians before them kept him in prison so long he can only think of himself as a gypsy and therefore at complete odds with the rest of us. Get that into your head. You’re a Gajo; he’s now of the Rom completely.’
‘Versailles,’ hazarded Boemelburg only to see her vehemently shake her head and hear her acidly toss the words at him. ‘It’s too popular, too fashionable, particularly these days.’
‘Then try to think. Try to give us a little more.’
‘So that the guillotine or the axe might fall on a neck whose head was empty?’
He sighed. ‘That temper of yours is far too swift for your own good. If you and your friends are innocent, I will personally see that you are cleared of all charges. You have my word on it.’
Is it as good as your Führer’s? she silently asked. Will you apologize for what you’ve done to us? ‘Agreed,’ she said but did not try to smile.
He gave her a moment. Gabrielle took her by the hand. ‘A monastery … You told me the gypsies always marked the way they had travelled by using special signs. You wanted us to look for Janwillem, Nana. You were certain that together we could find him.’
‘The patterans,’ she said. ‘The trident, the cross – heaps of leaves or grass at a corner of a crossroads, branches piled up in winter.’
‘The swastika,’ said Suzanne-Cécilia. ‘I remember once reading of it. An ancient symbol from India which was adopted and used by the gypsies in their wanderings. The gypsies …’
‘Don’t you dare taunt me, madame. And as for you.’ He looked at Nana. ‘De Vries would not have marked his trail this time.’
‘Not unless he wanted other gypsies to follow and to gather,’ said Nana softly.
‘For what purpose?’ he asked.
She let him have it. ‘Sabotage, since the times are no longer ordinary and there are so few of their people left. He has everything he needs, hasn’t he?’
‘Think, Nana,’ urged Gabrielle quickly interceding. ‘A conservatory – didn’t he once tell you of one?’
‘A house that had been fashionable in its day,’ added Suzanne-Cécilia, ‘but one which, on the death of its owner, had been left to a religious order.’
‘An arcade,’ said Nana. ‘An inner courtyard. Janwillem … I once overheard him saying to someone on the telephone that they should meet in the conservatory where … where the Prussian general had established his personal latrine during the war of 1870-71. The house is a former villa, Sturmbannführer, within whose stairwells the ceilings are still decorated with the same paintings of swallows that were there in the fourteenth century. There is a chapel. A maze of corridors connect innumerable bedchambers, since cut up into the more recent cells of the monks who have now long departed. Above the rooms and corridors there are gaping holes in the roof.’
‘Would it be in or near the Forêt de Marly-le-Roi, Nana?’ asked Gabrielle.
She didn’t look at any of them but said faintly, ‘Yes, that is where it is. L’Abbaye des frères bienveillants.’
The Abbey of the Benevolent Friars. ‘Were you ever there?’ asked Boemelburg.
Her gaze met his fully and she had to ask herself, Does he know of it after all? Has he suddenly remembered it?
‘Once and now … now I have given him to you and may my son and God Himself forgive me.’
In the pitch darkness before dawn, Hermann was silent. The rue Laurence-Savart had barely awakened. The Citroën was freezing. ‘Didn’t you sleep at all?’ asked St-Cyr.
‘A couple of hours.’
‘And Giselle, is she still determined to throw herself from the belfries of the Notre-Dame?’
‘What …? Oh, Giselle. A false alarm. Cramps, all that sort of thing. Her cycle’s way out of tune, but she’s still determined to kill herself, though she says she’ll wait to see if we return.’
‘And Oona?’ asked St-Cyr sadly.
‘Still thinks she’ll drown herself but admits it will be difficult cutting a hole through the ice without an axe.’
‘Bon! That should slow her up. Now why don’t you tell me what’s really bothering you? No baby on the way? I would have thought you’d be …’
‘Celebrating? Then read this. I got it from a friend of a friend at Gestapo Central but had to pay the lousy son of a bitch 10,000 for it.’
‘Francs?’
‘Idiot! Reichskassenscheine. Suddenly nobody wants francs any more, not since von Paulus stopped being supplied. There’s a rumour he told the Führer he was going to have to throw in the towel.’
Stalingrad … The Sixth Army … A hundred thousand men at least and had the pendulum finally begun to swing the other way? Berlin would be enraged.
The flimsy slip of paper was a copy of a telex from Himmler to Boemelburg and it had come in at 0530 hours, not ten minutes ago. SETTLE IT – that was all there was to the message, but the intended inference was Befehl ist Befehl, an order is an order.
‘Jacqmain blows his head off. The Spade is torched. Wehrle takes cyanide. Death follows on death but all Gestapo Paris-Central and the SS over in Saint-Cloud have to show for it is a shortage of at least 100,000,000 francs, an obvious absence of cyanide and explosives, and three women in their nightgowns, each of whom steadfastly claims her innocence! The Chief hasn’t any other choice. I’m telling you, Louis, it’s us or them. They’re terrorists.’
‘We can’t turn them in!’ It was a cry.
‘Look, I know that. I just had to get it clear with you because now it’ll have to be the five of us against all of them.’
‘Snipers?’
‘Or grenades but, yes, it’s the thought of snipers that worries me the most. Killed while attempting to apprehend the Gypsy! You, me, the three of them and it’s … why then it’s all settled and no one has to fuss about us any more. Hell, we only look after common crime. No one cares about that, not with all the really big crime that’s going on!’
‘And we’ve crossed the SS once too often.’
St-Cyr wet his lips in uncertainty as he searched the darkness ahead. ‘What did Boemelburg send the Reichsminister to engender such a resp
onse?’
‘That he wasn’t sure of our loyalties, nor those of the three suspects.’
There was a sigh. ‘Then they really do intend to kill us. It’s to be a classic Gestapo-SS ploy.’
Kohler tossed his hands in despair. ‘And we’re going to have to go in there after the Gypsy knowing there’s a gun at our backs and that the trigger will be pulled!’
Or the grenade thrown …
It wasn’t fair. It was criminal! but there was nothing they could do. ‘We’re already as good as dead. There will be mountains of white silk lilies and carnations for Gabrielle and her friends. Their coffins will be draped with swastikas. Tears will be shed wherever soldiers wait, and Goebbels will have a field day with it. Loyal French women killed in the act of assisting the Reich!’
Snow-covered, the lane passed through magnificent stands of oak and beech whose trunks stood tall and sentinel in the hushed and frozen air. The ruins were not within the Forêt de Marly-le-Roi, but were just on its outskirts and well to the north-west of the Joyenval crossroads.
From where he stood beside Boemelburg’s car, St-Cyr could not yet see them. Silently, as before an assault, heavily armed troops in their white, padded parkas, hoods and overtrousers fanned out to take up positions. Perhaps a platoon in number, perhaps two squads and some.
Uncertain of what lay ahead, Gabrielle looked steadily at him from the other side of the car; Suzanne-Cécilia also. From the north, another approach was being made. But there, the troops would have to pass through several hectares where willow shoots had been harvested down through the centuries for basket-making and other wickerwork. There, with backs to the thickets, Nana Thélème and Hermann would have to cross a frozen brook and fields and then make their way uphill through the abbey’s former gardens to the ruins.
The Forêt occupied a low and hilly plateau which had once bordered the ancestral Seine; the ruins were downhill of it on a lesser rise. Beyond them, in the lowlands, there was a brook and, beyond this, the willow shoots. It was, for De Vries and Tshaya and, in the past, the gypsy caravans, a perfect location. Isolated yet within twenty-five kilometres of Paris and all but surrounded by forest, copse or low-lying field and farm.
Gypsy Page 26