Gypsy

by J. Robert Janes

  Boemelburg didn’t even bother to get out of the car. ‘Louis, we’ll give you two hours before we move in. Warn us if he’s wired it. Enough good men have already been lost. Berlin are adamant. We can’t spare any more.’

  ‘But there are at least three others with them, Walter?’

  ‘Talk to them. Convince them to come out. If they throw down their arms, they’ll be deported. That’s the best I can do.’

  ‘And if they refuse?’

  ‘We’ll come in and get you.’

  ‘Am I not even to be allowed my gun?’

  ‘We want to talk to them, Louis. I’m sorry.’

  ‘And Hermann?’ The bags below Walter’s eyes seemed bigger, sadder, more jaundiced in the grey light.

  ‘No weapon either. Signal twice with the white flag when you’ve contacted De Vries, and three times when you’re ready to bring him and the others out. If they try to make a break for it, we’ll get them.’

  ‘There’s no need for Gabrielle and Madame Lemaire to come with me. Why not keep them here?’

  Must Louis make things difficult? ‘They’ll soften them. Their presence will make De Vries less cautious and more open to talking.’ Twice now Louis had noticed the rifles the snipers would use and had frantically torn his gaze from them. Had he realized what was to happen?

  ‘And if he’s not there? If there’s no one?’ leapt St-Cyr.

  ‘We’ll deal with that when we come to it.’

  ‘Then it’s au revoir’ he said, dismayed.

  ‘Bonne chance.’

  Sickened by what was to happen – betrayed, angry – he took Gabrielle and Suzanne-Cécilia by an arm. As they picked their way among the trees and underbrush, his spine was tense. If he could he would shove each of them aside and try to cover for them as they scrambled away.

  But it would do no good. They’d all be taken. ‘Did you kill the Spade?’ he asked. There was a shallow ravine they had to cross and he was helping them into this. Gabrielle met his gaze.

  ‘Why do you ask? Why do you doubt me so?’

  Suzanne-Cécilia said, ‘There is no way we could have, Inspector.’

  ‘It’s Chief Inspector,’ he replied impatiently. ‘Gestapo surveillance on you both was not in any way complete until after you had turned yourself in, Gabrielle. Not until Thursday afternoon. Did you pierce his eyes?’

  ‘Is this what you believe of me, Jean-Louis?’

  They would tell him nothing. They would each be shot – would he hear the sniper’s gun? he wondered. Would he see them throw up their arms and open their mouths to cry out silently in shocked surprise even as they crumpled to the ground, or would they die from a grenade?

  ‘I need to know. I cannot find it in me to believe any of you capable of such cruelty but the detective in me says I could be wrong.’

  Silence followed the outburst. Gabrielle was a good head taller than either of them and easily pulled herself out of the ravine. Suzanne-Cécilia remained behind and when the two of them waited, looking down at her, Céci, disheartened and afraid, looked up to say, ‘They’re going to kill us, aren’t they, Jean-Louis?’

  In despair he looked away to where the men could no longer be seen. ‘Yes.’

  Hurriedly she crossed herself and kissed her fingertips, having pulled off Marianne’s mitten to do so. ‘I’ve not killed anyone,’ she said, ‘but since it seems a time for confessions, I would have slept with you willingly in that house of your mother’s we shared so briefly.’

  ‘I knew it!’ said Gabrielle. ‘You can’t be trusted, can you, Céci?’

  ‘Then the sous-directeur of Cartier’s was not your lover?’

  ‘M. Laviolette? Me? I simply rented the house from him to be closer to the wireless. He was tempted to believe an affair possible. He was always prepared and would try to press the issue but … Ah! what can a woman say?’

  Kneeling, reaching out to her, he wrapped a hand about her arm and pulled her up, and for a moment the two of them knelt facing each other, Gabrielle looking uncertainly towards the troops, then to them and then towards the ruins which could not yet be seen. ‘Have I lost you, Jean-Louis?’ she asked, but heard no answer, simply his, ‘Where, then, did you hide the wireless set?’

  His eyes were so large and deeply brown, soft, warm, full of concern and compassion for them, and for herself, thought Suzanne-Cécilia. ‘In the holding tanks below the pens of the wild pigs. They are not to be emptied until spring but by then it won’t matter will it?’

  He pulled off a glove to gently touch her swollen cheek and to refix the sticking plaster which had come loose over the bridge of her nose. ‘I enjoyed our moment, even as I have enjoyed those I have shared with your amie de guerre. Now, please, let us go forward. To stay here is to invite the bullet or the grenade. Hermann and Nana may already have been killed.’

  ‘But … but we have heard nothing? No shots …?’ blurted Suzanne-Cécilia.

  ‘She’s right, Jean-Louis,’ said Gabrielle more harshly than she wanted, for this was love she was seeing before her and she knew she could not fight it but must let it happen.

  The willows had been a bugger to get through. Not copsed since before the Defeat, they offered superb cover. But now there was open space, now snow-covered fields of stubble sloped down to the brook in its swale before rising gently up to the ruins.

  Perhaps eight hectares had been enclosed by the abbey’s outer walls, perhaps a little more. It was hard to tell, for the walls had fallen in several places offering perfect defensive and sentry positions. Forest and brush had long ago encroached on an orchard that could now hold terrorists. Ah Gott im Himmel!

  Desperately looking for a way out, Kohler stood beside Nana Thélème. The men, supremely confident and thoroughly experienced, had taken up their positions. The dogs they had brought with them were muzzled but intently searched the lie of the land as he did.

  There wasn’t a sound. Breath steamed in the air.

  ‘At least let us have a look, eh?’ he said to the lieutenant in charge. Under the padded white parka, the bastard wore the ribbon of the Winterschlacht im Osten 1941/42, the ‘Frozen Meat Medal’. He had lost his right leg to the Russians but had got through the willow shoots easily enough on that prosthesis of his.

  The silver wound badge and both the EK2 and EK1 were pinned to that same tunic, the Eiserne Kreuz, the Iron Cross.

  Max Engelmann and the SS-Untersturmführer Schacht had chosen to wait in the Citroën. Schacht had even asked for the keys ‘in case of problems’. Goodbye car, goodbye trouble.

  Given the field glasses, Kohler searched the ruins for any sign of life.

  ‘Janwillem and Tshaya won’t have built up the fire during the day,’ confided Nana sadly.

  The belfry of the chapel dominated everything. From there, the abbey’s walls enclosed a substantial inner courtyard in which there were now large trees. He could make out nothing of the arcades at ground level, could get only glimpses of gaping windows and holes in the roof above them. Once stuccoed, the thick grey limestone of the walls was often exposed in ragged patches and where not, the yellowness of age and dampness remained.

  A lane, unused in today’s approaches, could just be made out leading in from a gap in the forest to the west. Men would be covering it, should De Vries and his band attempt a break-out.

  ‘That is enough, ja?’ said the lieutenant.

  Kohler handed the glasses back to him. ‘Your rifle’s Russian. Hey, my boys were both killed at Stalingrad. I wonder if it was with one of those?’

  ‘A lady’s gun. The Soviets always make a big thing of their women snipers but the truth is, the weapon doesn’t stand up to field use.’

  ‘May I?’ asked Kohler, and not waiting for an answer, took the rifle from him to examine its telescopic sight. ‘What’s it set for?’

  ‘1300 metres,’ came the grim and wary answer.

  The distance from here to the outer walls? wondered Kohler. The SVT40, the self-loading Tokarev, had a ten-round deta
chable box and used 7.62 mm cartridges. To the sniper, its semiautomatic action’s main advantage was that a second shot could be rapidly got off without moving the cheek from the stock to reload. ‘It seems we can’t make anything ourselves any more,’ he grumbled. ‘Our Gewehr 41s are simply copies of this.’

  ‘But better. Now give it back to me, ja? und go. Already we are a little behind schedule.’

  ‘Just let me tie my shoelace. Here, Nana, would you hold this?’

  Swiftly Kohler turned aside to give the rifle to her. The lieutenant made a move to get round him, but the muzzle of a 9 mm Beretta was pushing his chin up.

  The gun had been strapped to a leg …

  ‘Say nothing, my friend,’ breathed Kohler. ‘Just walk out there as if there’s been a little change of plan and you’re going to check out the ruins with us. Nana, put the rifle under your coat, the muzzle down. Leave only one button done up so that you can hand it to me quickly.’

  ‘You won’t get away with this!’ seethed the lieutenant.

  ‘Hey, relax. We already have.’

  Where the forest ended, the walls began. Trapped, St-Cyr looked anxiously back towards the troops and Boemelburg’s car, but there was no sign of anyone, so well were the men hidden.

  Then he realized tears were misting his eyes and lamely said to the others, ‘This way, I think.’

  Merde, it was terrible knowing the shots could come at any moment. Why do they not get it over with then? he demanded. Why must they torment us like this?

  ‘Janwillem De Vries was the “package”, wasn’t he?’ he said bitterly to Gabrielle who was in front of him. Suzanne-Cécilia had fallen back a little. ‘When I talked to René Yvon-Paul, he told me things were far too difficult for them. After De Vries had done all the robberies you had arranged for him, he was to have been taken to Château Thériault to meet up with the local Resistance. From there, what was it to have been?’

  Neither of them replied. Gabrielle pulled off one of her mittens to break a small icicle from the lip of a rocky ledge. It was so beautiful.

  ‘Your Vouvray people were to have taken the Gyspy where?’ he demanded. ‘Was he to meet his next contact under the tail of the bronze horse?’

  Lyon was a centre of the Resistance and one of their meeting-places, known just as he had given it, was near the equestrian statue of Louis XIV in place Bellecour, but how had Jean-Louis learned of it? ‘Lyon is far too dangerous now,’ she said. ‘Our contacts in Vouvray had agreed to take him through Château-roux to Limoges, Toulouse and Narbonne.’

  ‘And then?’ he asked, subdued.

  It was Suzanne-Cécilia who said, ‘Perpignan and then into Andorra.’

  ‘Via the tobacco smugglers of Las Pscalades?’ he asked.

  ‘And from there into Spain to Seo de Urgel and Córdoba.’

  The truth at last. ‘Then Gibralter,’ he sighed. ‘The diamonds would have been proof enough of the Reich’s desperate need for them. It’s a tragedy it went so badly, but what I cannot forgive is that you didn’t take Hermann and myself into your confidence. We could have helped!’

  He was really upset and was needing answers. ‘I tried to keep you both out of it,’ said Gabrielle sadly. ‘I knew that Hermann would be placed in an untenable position, and with him, Giselle and Oona. Oh for sure, I had faith in him but even so, it was not simply up to me. The decision had to come from all of us.’

  ‘We were striking a fantastic blow for France, Jean-Louis,’ said Suzanne-Cécilia earnestly.

  ‘And the money the Gypsy stole? Was it to have funded the Resistance?’

  Must he press so hard? wondered Gabrielle, dismayed to be facing him like this. ‘They were to have taken it south. Eventually it was to have reached the maquis of the Auvergne and those in the Haute Savoie.’

  ‘They are desperate for funds,’ confided Suzanne-Cécilia, hesitantly reaching out to him. ‘We … we had worked it all out. At least 100,000,000. It’s a lot, but …’ Hastily she wiped away her tears. ‘But it wasn’t to be.’

  ‘Did the Spade learn of your plans?’ he asked.

  ‘Why must you keep harping about that one?’ demanded Gabrielle, in tears herself.

  ‘Did Tshaya tell him of what Janwillem De Vries knew of us – is this what you’re thinking?’ blurted Suzanne-Cécilia.

  ‘You know that is what I wondering. Mon Dieu, why must you both be so stubborn? Why can you not tell me everything now? The Gypsy is in there among the ruins with others. He’ll have wired the place, will have created a last refuge, lines of defence, escape routes most certainly.’

  ‘Perhaps, then, you had best ask him when we find him,’ said Gabrielle. ‘Perhaps either he or Tshaya will tell you so that you … you will not believe us guilty of such a sadistic murder!’

  ‘The Generalmajor Wehrle had no choice but to kill himself,’ interjected Suzanne-Cécilia earnestly. ‘Once he learned Nana was seriously under suspicion, and then of Gabrielle’s arrest and the raid on my wireless set, he knew precisely what awaited him at the hands of his fellow Nazis.’

  Swiftly he asked which of them had given Wehrle the cyanide. ‘Answer me, damn you. Men like Wehrle wouldn’t have been issued such a thing.’

  They said no more, these two résistants. Taking each other by the hand, they walked on ahead of him until coming to a gap in the wall. Then they were lost to view and he was left to face the forest and his doubts, to search, to try to find the rifle that had marked him down.

  When no shot was fired, he made his way along to the gap and stepped through it to find them waiting for him. Both were desperately afraid of what must lie ahead. Both anxiously swept their eyes over the trees and brush that lay before them until the ruins were reached.

  ‘Wehrle had ordered caviar and champagne again,’ he said, ‘but Nana couldn’t understand his having done so since it automatically implicated her in his death and in everything else. Perhaps he blamed her for betraying him and helping the Gypsy, perhaps he merely wished to atone for the mistake he had made and was thinking of the well-being of loved ones in the Reich, but someone had to have given him the cyanide.’

  ‘And?’ asked Gabrielle sharply.

  He shrugged. He said, ‘That leaves only the two of you.’

  ‘Which implies we robbed Nana’s former villa in Saint-Cloud – is this what you are thinking, Jean-Louis? A stronghold of the SS. The headquarters of their Sonderkommando?’

  ‘Didn’t Janwillem and Tshaya rob it?’ demanded Suzanne-Cécilia.

  ‘They wouldn’t have given Wehrle the cyanide. They had no reason to do so. Having robbed him, what more need of him had they?’

  It was Gabrielle who said, ‘The SS could have taken him aside and given it to him with an ultimatum.’

  ‘But … but they showed no signs of having done so?’ he said, looking earnestly from one to the other of them.

  ‘He doesn’t realize we’re in a war,’ blurted Suzanne-Cécilia. ‘He has failed entirely to understand us!’

  ‘Then perhaps he had best talk to Nana. Perhaps Nana can tell him the things he so desperately wants to know.’

  Two shots rang out. Two more soon followed but by then they were running towards the sounds only to now hear the fierce barking of dogs. ‘Hermann …’ began St-Cyr. ‘H … e … r … mann!’

  Widely spaced from one another across the open expanse of fields, three of the dogs lay dead in the snow.

  Kohler waited for the others to be released. Lying flat on his stomach, his legs spread, he held the rifle ready. ‘Let the lieutenant go,’ he said, not looking back to where Nana kept the Beretta on the man. ‘Take his ammunition pouch. Hey, mein Kamerad, we want no trouble with any of you. This is between Herr Engelmann, myself and the SS-Untersturmführer Schacht. Tell your men to hold the rest of the dogs and to send those two up to us.’

  ‘You are to be allowed to enter the ruins alone. No one else is to go with you. I have my orders.’

  ‘Fuck your orders. We’ve now warned the sons of bit
ches we’re here and they’re surrounded, eh? The Gypsy will have wired those ruins so well we can’t have the dogs setting them off. I’ll need the extra hands and eyes.’

  ‘The dogs were let go because you took me hostage. They were not to have been released unless all else had failed and you hadn’t been able to bring the Gypsy and his woman out.’

  ‘And if we had?’ asked Kohler, taking aim again. ‘You’d have dropped each of us, eh? and would have left De Vries to the last.’

  ‘And then released the dogs to stop him from running,’ said Nana in deutsch. ‘Bitte, Herr Leutnant, I do not want to kill you or anyone. This whole thing is a tragic mistake. Herr Engelmann and the Untersturmführer are very wrong about us and are the ones to blame for what the Gypsy has done.’

  The pistol was too tightly gripped. Kohler was pinned down …

  ‘I will shoot you if I have to,’ she said. ‘You see, they have left us no choice. Now go, please, before I do.’

  Engelmann had come to the edge of the willows. One of the dogs strained at the leash he held.

  With a single shot, Kohler hit the animal in the chest, causing it to rear up suddenly on its hind legs and to fall back. Herr Max scrambled for cover.

  ‘Tell Gestapo Boemelburg I could have dropped that man had I wanted to. The rifle’s good but it pulls a little towards the top left quadrant. Hey, tell the boys I like dogs and hated to shoot them. They were beautiful animals.’

  ‘I’ll tell him and I’ll try to keep the other two back.’

  ‘Good.’

  They watched as he walked down towards the brook. He held up his arms and spread them widely to signal that no one should do anything until he got there. Without a word, Kohler got up and together with Nana ran for cover behind the wall.

  ‘Now start filling me in on De Vries,’ he said, not letting her get free of him. ‘And don’t stop until I know how the son of a bitch will think and what he’ll do and have done.’

  ‘And Tshaya?’ she asked, her dark eyes registering dismay as he took the pistol from her. ‘She hates me. She’ll try to kill me. She can use explosives just as well as Janwillem but is of the Rom and knows their ways and these ruins, so will have the others at her beck and call.’