Carnival (2 page)

Not understanding a word she had said, this Frenchman shrugged. Their coffee came, and for a time these two companions of hers were silent. ‘The Army should use parsnips,' she said after taking a few exploratory sips. ‘This is good,
ja
, but it could be much better.'

‘Parsnips,' echoed Hermann who had an encyclopedic interest in all such things of the Occupation. ‘Not roasted acorns and barley, and maybe with a touch of chicory if one is lucky?'

The Frenchman rolled his eyes in despair but had best be ignored. ‘You do not peel them, you understand, Herr Hauptmann Detektiv Aufsichtsbeamter. Just wash in cold water and shred, then roast until black before grinding. Eighty turns of the mill, I give it until it is as fine as the flour we used to be able to buy. Then brew as you would that other stuff you mentioned.
Ach
, my little sister swore she couldn't tell the difference and said it's real!'

‘Louis, what have I always been telling you, eh? Right from the start of this war you people started, you French should have listened to your friends.
Mein Gott
, Frau Oberkircher, the answers to so many of the problems they've caused themselves and us, too, are often so simple and right to hand!'

Like the lack of real coffee.

‘Now don't argue,' quipped Kohler in French. ‘Let's take a little walk.
Bitte, meine gute
Frau
, you'll hold our seats? A breath of fresh air will do this one good.'

The Bavarian was fifty-five years old, Claudette felt, the Frenchman perhaps three years his junior. Much taller and stronger looking, a giant of a man, Herr Kohler's eyes were pale blue, the lids bagging and drooping from exhaustion, no doubt. And sometimes those eyes had been so empty when he had looked at one of the SS, his gaze had frightened her, but always when he had turned to her there had been that little rush of excitement in herself. Though those years had slipped away some time ago, Herr Kohler hadn't let their absence deter him. He was not at all like a
gestapiste
, though he did have the chin and cheekbones of a storm trooper, the scar of a terrible wound and far more recent than those that other war had left, the shrapnel. A criminal with a knife? she wondered of that scar. A dueling sword? A bullet graze had recently brushed his brow. Occasionally the thick fingers would favour it as if he was counting his blessings. No ring of course, but probably married, the hair cut close and neither brown nor black but a shade in between, like his marital status, and flecked with grey.

The Frenchman was altogether something else, even if he did wear a wedding ring he'd best change to his other hand unless he wanted to be stopped by the police and hauled in for questioning. Of a little more than medium height and blocky, he had the deep brown ox-eyes common to those people, the fists of a
pugiliste—
had he lost the fight that had given him the stitches? she wondered. The hair was dark brown and needing a trim, the moustache wide and bushy, and as for the eyebrows, must they give him a look that was so fierce?

Outside in the darkness, Louis couldn't wait. ‘She's carrying cigarettes in that lighter suitcase, Hermann. How could you do this to us? She's let herself cosy up to you, knowing she's with two
Schweinebullen
and still has hopes you'll unwittingly waltz her through customs!'

‘
Ach,
I wondered when you'd figure that out. She's terrified of the company we've had to keep and feels like an utter fool for having chanced what she did and has stuck to us like glue. Go easy on her, eh? Just be your generous self and thankful that she's let us know that Kolmar's
schwarzer Markt
is flourishing. That Kolmar is with a
K
, by the way, not a
C
.'

And never mind the Deutsch. Its black market, its
marché noir
. Cigarettes must now be the preferred currency in the Reich, as they were in France. ‘That no-good, piano-teaching brother-in-law of hers, “that brute of a one-legged
Frenchman
and seducer of young girls,” was into more than student skirts, Hermann. While helping that little sister of hers go through his things, your Frau Oberkircher, for all she wishes to disclaim and hide her French origins, came upon the mother lode of fags and felt it her duty as a citizen of the Greater Reich to confiscate the evidence before her sister found it!'

As was their custom when on short rations and in need of a quiet tête-à-tête, a cigarette was rescued from an inner pocket—Louis's this time. Kohler found them a light, and after a few drags each, they began to walk toward the centre of the old town, gripped as it was in glacial darkness.

‘Silicon carbide?' asked St-Cyr.

‘It was close, Louis. Just be thankful the RAF came along when they did.'

‘
Ah,
bon
, then it's as I've thought. During the war of 1870–71, the region's Francs-Tireurs constantly harassed the Prussians. Now it's the turn of their descendants.'

The region's irregulars, its citizen soldiers. In Vichy, not a day—was it still only a day ago?—they'd had a final run-in with the FTP, the Francs-Tireurs
et Partisans
, a Résistance group started by Communist railway workers in Lyons. Tough—real sons of bitches who had put Louis at the top of their hit list simply because he had to work with one of the Occupier.

‘Even though Alsace was taken in less than five days by the Prussians in 1870, Hermann, and Paris placed under siege and France defeated within five months, not five weeks as in 1940, the people of the Vosges kept much to themselves. Let's not forget it, because we mustn't, and just to prove it to you, I'm going to take you to have a look at the Lion.'

They had had some soup and two of the regulation twenty-five gram slices of the grey National. They had each handed over a bread ticket and had left the customary two-franc donation for the Winter Relief that was run by the Secours National, the national help.

They had tried to doze off, saying little, each knowing the other's thoughts could well be in a turmoil. The future, which people seldom if ever thought about these days, was far too cloudy and troubling.

Then they had come out here, the shadows deepening as they had approached the rock face, while etched in silhouette on high, the château, the citadel, defied assault as it had during the Franco-Prussian War.

Hermann, his fedora pulled down hard, the collar of his greatcoat up and close, couldn't seem to lower his gaze. He would be thinking of the 103-day siege that had ended twenty-­one days
after
the Armistice of that war, would be telling himself­ that Colonel Denfert-Rochereau of
place
D-R in Paris­, its métro station, too, and countless streets in France, had defied­ the Prussians for so long, even Bismark and the Kaiser had been forced to acknowledge the bravery and agree to freeing Belfort and its immediately surrounding territory from the fate so much of Alsace-Lorraine was to suffer. Annexation.

He would also be seeing the dead of the Great War, the long, dark lines of the trenches in the snow, the gun emplacements, would be thinking of Vieil-Armand which was less than thirty-five kilometres to the northeast of them: Alsace's Verdun where, for eight long, hard months over the winter of 1914–15 and into the summer, more than 30,000 men had died, but not himself, the French 75s answering his own 77s which had raced ahead to twenty-five rounds a minute. The drumfire, the Germans had come to call those French guns:
Das Trommel­feuer
; while the French
poilus
, the common soldiers, had spoken of the other side's shelling as
la tempête de feu
, the tempest of fire. He would know, too, that his partner was all too aware of this and that its enduring memories were but one of the things that had welded the partnership, but still, reminders must always be given.

Some twenty-two metres long and eleven high, and caught against the sheer rock face below the citadel, resting on its hind quarters with right foreleg stiff and head turned a little from the rock out of which that head had been carved, the Lion, still in shadow cold, appeared as if about to roar.

‘I always wondered what it would look like, Louis, but could never bring myself to see it.'

Between 1875 and 1880, Colmar's sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, had fashioned it largely out of blocks of that same rock as the citadel and the old town.

‘The red sandstone of the Vosges,' muttered Hermann sadly, ‘but there's granite to the north and northeast,' he said as if that were the answer to everything. ‘Granite's far harder, Louis. It splinters when struck. Forms the busts, the heart, the guts of these rounded hills here in the south, is far worse than any shrapnel.'

He touched his face, and one knew at once where those nicks and scars had come from. Belfort the ‘Heroic' lay in the Trouée de Belfort, the Gap through which the invading hordes had come. Celts, Goths, Romans and others, the Germans of course, and more than once.

‘We could see the Black Forest from the summit of Vieil-Armand,' he went on. ‘We could see what we called home only to then have to give up the crest of that hill to your side. Time and again we took it; time and again it was lost.'

Another cigarette was found and, once lit, passed over.

‘Gerda was waiting for me,' he said, as if the girl he'd known as a teenager was still vital, the girl he had married and had two sons with.

‘
Ach
, how times have changed, eh? Now I live with Oona and Giselle on those rare moments when we're in Paris, while my Gerda … '

Had begged an uncle with connections in the Nazi Party to help her get a divorce so that she could marry an indentured farm labourer from France who was helping out on her father's farm near Wasserburg, just to the east of Munich. And yes, both Giselle and Oona had come to love him and it wasn't difficult to see that each understood and respected the other's feelings and willingly—yes, willingly!—shared what little they saw of him and had become fast friends themselves.

‘War does things like that,' muttered Kohler, having read his partner's thoughts. ‘It also brings enemies like us together, so please don't forget it.'

Enemies. He hadn't said that in a long, long time, had always been planning to get Giselle and Oona out of France and into Spain.

‘Bartholdi may have sculpted New York's Statue of Liberty with freedom in mind, Hermann, but that isn't why I brought you here. One hundred and three days up there in that citadel? They held fast to what they had come to believe in, themselves. That hot box was a warning to us of the Francs-Tireurs, as was the plethora of Felgendarmen and Gestapo looking for deserters in the railway station. Since this Kommandant Rasche was one of your former commanding officers at Vieil-Armand, and no doubt has remembered your usefulness, perhaps you had best tell me about it.'

Ah, damn! ‘That left ball of mine … '

‘
Sacré nom de nom
, have I not been subjected to that little legend enough? Swelled to the size of a ripe lemon? As hard as a dried one. A grapefruit perhaps?'

‘You've no sympathy. I'm not at all surprised your first wife left you for a railway man from Orléans!'

‘She was lonely.'

‘You told me your practising the euphonium for the police band drove her away!'

‘That too.'

‘Then she didn't take off with a door-to-door salesman or a lorry driver? You actually lied to me?'

Hermann had caught a ‘cold' in that most tender of places while in the trenches and snows of that Alsatian battlefield.

‘You know what those field hospitals were like, Louis. I couldn't have some
verdammt
Wehrmacht medic amputating the necessary.'

Ah,
merde!

‘I went AWOL and found myself an Alsatian pharmacist's daughter who was training to fill her father's shoes even though it was heresy of her to have thought of such a thing.'

‘She was pretty.'

‘Sweet heaven but I couldn't have done it with her and she knew it.'

And so much for his subsequent tour of duty in a
Himmelfahrtskommando
, a suicide commando, as one of its trip-to-heaven boys.

‘I could have been shot. Instead, Rasche, who headed up the court of inquiry, thought I might be useful and gave me a choice, and when I took it, six months of never knowing when the next second would be my last.'

Hence his uncanny ability to find tripwires and smell out explosives. ‘Carnival, Hermann. It's from the medieval Latin for Flesh Farewell, the celebration that precedes the forty meatless days of Lent.'

‘Masked girls and boys who simply want to get into mischief, eh? Costumes? Music and dancing and torch-lit parades and feasts in an
Arbeitslager
, a work camp,
mein Lieber
?'

It was a good question. ‘A travelling fair too, I think. Sideshows, booths with games of skill or chance, others exhibiting the wonders of the world.'

‘
Ja, ja
, the palace of mirrors, eh? Well please don't forget that this Colonel Rasche of mine could break every one of them with a simple look.'

‘But does he know of the Francs-Tireurs who tried to stop our train, or simply think, as others must, that they might be out there in those hills?'

‘Helping deserters to cross over?'

That, too, was a good question.

Karneval
, thought Kohler. A travelling fair with games, sideshows, rides and other forms of amusement. Normally run as a commercial enterprise, occasionally held by charitable groups as a way of raising funds.

Rasche would give them no peace. Relegated to looking after
Arbeitslagern
, long past retirement and still a colonel? It didn't bear thinking about.