Carnival (31 page)

Each was of clear glass and contained an all but clear liquid, their slender necks thin and with a frosted necklace so that when snapped off, the spine would not splinter, but sometimes did, the name clearly given.

‘A hexobarbitone, Fräulein. Usually of the sodium salt. Slightly bitter but very soluble in alcohol or water. Given intravenously as an anaesthetic whose reaction is swift. Taken orally also, in capsule form or in a glass of schnapps or
eau-de-vie
. Within as little as fifteen minutes it causes a deep and comatose sleep of from two to four hours, depending on the dosage of course.'

There was panic in her.

‘I … I didn't know she had those, Inspector. I swear I didn't.'

‘Mademoiselle, let's dispense with subterfuge. You have often been in this room. As we went from item to item, including the flacon of
Mirage
on that dressing table, or stood momentarily looking around us, you betrayed a familiarity your reflection in its mirror could not deny. Renée Ekkehard wasn't just your friend who brought home the travel papers you would need to visit Vittel on the last Friday of every month. She was a fellow
résistante
.'

‘We weren't moving deserters. We wouldn't have done such a stupid, stupid thing.
Ah,
mon Dieu
, Inspector, I've my mother to think of and … and I'd Claudette as well. Renée was simply very depressed and suicidal. She had seen things no decent human being could ever tolerate and had felt how hopeless her life was. I tried to tell her that she didn't have to marry Alain but she kept on insisting that if she didn't, she had only one other choice. She took it to save Sophie.'

‘Her lover.'

‘Alain found out about them—he must have. That … that is how I see it.'

‘Then think on it, mademoiselle. Think hard.'

He left her, left the bureau drawer open, the lingerie not replaced, the ampoules still lying there. Made her ask herself would two be enough?

Alone, the chief inspector sat at the table in the
Stube
, having still not gone to bed. Pipe smoke billowed from him so lost was he in thought, felt Yvonne, having come down the stairs as quietly as possible. Everything—all the bits and pieces of this investigation of theirs, this tragedy—was laid out before him. The two rose-coloured buttons that had come from that dress Renée had worn out to the
Karneval
last August. Snapshots, some torn, others not, of the wife and little son of Eugène Thomas were there. A wedding ring made of beautifully worked tin, the missing corner of that page from Victoria's notebook. Chemical formulae and wouldn't he have noticed that among Geneviève's schoolbooks there were those that dealt with chemistry?

‘An anonymous letter,' said St-Cyr, not looking up. ‘An earring, Frau Lutze. While the house sleeps or doesn't, let us contemplate each of these items.'

He indicated the spread before him, asked, ‘Are Hermann and I to take them with us tomorrow when we go, as we must, to Natzweiler-Struthof to question Alain Schrijen and try to put an end to this matter?'

‘Please, I … I know so little …'

‘A second-class ticket for Strassburg for this coming weekend?'

The thirteenth and fourteenth of February to be precise and the second party Renée was to have attended at Natzweiler-Struthof.

‘Had she been told, do you think, that she had best come or else?'

An ultimatum. ‘I … I think so, yes. Yes, now that you mention it, I do recall her saying she had to go, that … that if she didn't, Herr Schrijen's son would be very angry.'

The pipe was companionably removed. ‘
Ah,
bon
, you should have told us that before, shouldn't you?' he said
en français
. A roll of bills, bound with a rubber band, was touched. ‘The Lagergeld Eugène Thomas was probably going to pay the assistant machinist for making this.'

The wedding ring.

The chief inspector then touched the pocket watch Renée had had to borrow but said no more of it. Pages from Kolmar's
Morgenzeitung
were fingered, a reminder of the lunch that girl had taken and something she, herself, would definitely have known of but had said nothing of. Did he think her guilty?

A bead of solder, a swatch of grey-green cloth the size of a tunic's lapel were there, the dying of this last really quite good. ‘Boudicca,' he said, fingering the small carving. ‘Unfortunately her javelin broke off when the cage those POWs call home was turned upside down.'

Other newspapers, scraps torn from the personals columns, were underneath a bloodied papier-mâché ball that looked as if partly chewed.

The ampoules were not here, of course, nor was the lingerie.

‘Please sit across the table from me,' he said. There were three pieces from broken gramophone recordings in front of her and she had to ask herself, Had he anticipated her coming downstairs?

‘
Das Rheingold und Die Walküre
, Frau Lutze. Was that girl to have found two deserters waiting for her at the
Karneval
on Saturday, 30 January, or was she to have gone farther east to collect and guide them back, and then hide them among those ruins?'

‘How could I possibly know?'

‘Please don't lie to me, not when my partner and I must leave early to interview Alain Schrijen whose fiancée carried a man's pocket watch while hers … Where did you tell me it was? At a repair shop, 3 Schöngstrasse, wasn't it? A Maurice Springer. Am I to assume that Victoria Bödicker and Sophie Schrijen also knew of him, or am I to ask Alain Schrijen? Repeated repairs to an expensive wristwatch that Colonel Rasche could easily have returned to Brequet's on
place
Vendôme when next in Paris? Has this Springer a relative living on the other side of the Rhine, especially if one goes through Neuf-Brisach and Alt-Breisach?'

‘Herr Springer's brother lives in Vogtsburg and has a string of hides in the forest leading up to the Totenkopf. He's the Kaiserstuhl's
Wildhüter
.'

Its gamekeeper and probably at least twenty-five kilometres from the carnival.

‘Is he involved?' demanded Yvonne, now desperate. ‘Is Maurice, whom I've known all my life, as has Victoria and Sophie? If so, I must blame myself. You see, Inspector, Maurice Springer would stop me in the street to tell me when Renée's watch would be ready for pickup and to ask if I would please let her know. Three days, a week, sometimes ten days, seldom more. I didn't ask why he would bother with such advance notices. I simply felt the girl was anxious to have her watch back and that he had understood this. After all, she was the Kommandant's secretary and must have needed it.'

There were tears and that was understandable. ‘But those who should have been waiting at the
Karneval
weren't there, so the girl went east to find out why and then came back exhausted.'

‘I didn't kill her, nor would my husband.'

‘Yet he went out there in the
Polizeikommandantur
's
Grüne Minna
on that Saturday afternoon at about 4.00 p.m., your having told me that the two of you always did the shopping and afterward visited the
Winstube
of a friend, returning home at around 3.00.'

‘My husband and Otto tell me very little, often nothing.'

‘Of course, but you knew that girl was going out there instead of Sophie Schrijen, and you knew that upstairs in your daughter's bedroom there were three ampoules of Evipan that girl must have brought back from Natzweiler-Struthof. Everything that is in that room is known to you.'

‘Geneviève is my daughter. It … it helps to keep me close to her.'

‘And to Renée Ekkehard?'

‘After she came back from that party, I …'

‘Frau Lutze, I haven't time. You've been keeping an eye on that girl ever since she first arrived on your doorstep. You even went through that grip of my partner's and mine and had a look at our guns.'

‘She was so pretty, I … I couldn't help myself. Otto—'

‘Has let her and the other two drag us all down, hasn't he?'

Through the gilded letters of an altered name, history fled in faded outlines:
APOTHEKE FERBER
… PHARMACIE FERBER …
and there, again,
APOTHEKE
. Impatiently scraping at the frost on the inside of the Citroën's windscreen, St-Cyr peered at the shop. This war, he lamented silently, the Occupation of France, the Annexation here, the interwar years and those from 1870 until 11 November 1918. Weren't they all coming home to roost to make the statement that humanity would never learn because it couldn't?

Hermann stood before the arched, dark-mullioned windows of the shop, framed by trusses too many and a reminder of the impediments guaranteed by war, but other items too: a pyramid of tooth powder to his right, but even there one had to ask, Chalk dust, soot and peppermint, as in Paris and the rest of France?

It was 9.57 a.m. Berlin time, Wednesday, 10 February and they had a long way to go and an interview neither of them looked forward to.

Pedestrians brushed past Hermann who seemed stuck in memory and still looking into the shop. Twin demijohns of pickled snakes, a favourite of all such shops during the
fin de siècle
, simply presented their owner—this girl who, at the age of nineteen, had rescued him in 1915 and had then spoken in his defence to Colonel Rasche—with a problem of disposal.

Posters flashed the benefits of Sirop Ferber, a spring tonic whose
belle fille
had once adorned a similar poster:
Régénérez-vous par le Sirop Vincent
. It had been in every pharmacy and she had simply cut the figure out and slapped it on to a poster of her own making:
Deutsch
as ordered.

A girl then, a middle-aged woman now, he reminded himself, one who must have little patience and absolutely no free time. As in France, and here still, unless one was on their very deathbed, one always consulted the pharmacist, never, God forbid, a doctor. The former had to undergo a rigorous training—three years or more—but acquired none of the arrogance and pathetic ignorance typical of the latter.

Harried, Hermann finally tore his gaze from the window to take in the crowded bus terminal which was diagonally across the Unterlindenstrasse and next to the
ancien cloître
where Augustinian­ nuns had established their convent in the thirteenth century. He gave the whole thing the quick once-over, realizing as did his partner, that there would be twice-daily
autobus au gazogène
runs to Neuf-Brisach that anyone could have taken if needed on that Sunday, a distance of probably not more than fifteen or so kilometres, the
Karneval
and the Kastenwald being about halfway between it and Kolmar.

Strains of ‘Deutschland Über Alles' came from the Platz where fresh-faced recruits in their early twenties and late teens stood rigidly to attention, their single suitcases behind them, each casting its shadow on the snow.

Hermann had ducked into the pharmacy.

The line-up was the length of the display cases whose glass tops were curved and still the same as they'd been in 1914 and '15, thought Kohler. To one side, a woman in her sixties handled the nonprescriptive trade, giving him the look-see as he rushed past. Coughs echoed, for the ceiling was high and of embossed tin plate, just as he had remembered it. ‘My chest,' he heard someone saying. ‘The usual,' grunted another.

The dispensary was still at the very back of the shop and behind the lift-up of an oaken countertop that had been scored by the years of use. The register which contained the dates, names and prescriptions filled, still weighed probably thirty kilos and was bound by brass rods and to his left. Behind the counter, he setting it back in place, an open doorway led discreetly into that alchemy of alchemies where jars and glass-stoppered bottles filled narrow shelves and a roll-away ladder sometimes had to be used.

The auburn hair that had been soft and long and had touches­ of dark red was now worn much shorter, prematurely greying and had hastily been pinned into a bun. The eyes … they'd once been of the warmest shade of greenish-brown and lively too, were now faded, puffy-lidded and behind black-rimmed specs that made her look like a forty-seven-year-old tyrant.

The rosy cheeks were no longer firm and smooth but flaccid and pale. In waves, her voice broke over him.

‘Hermann … Hermann, is it really you?'
Ach
, he had aged. Too many late nights, too much tobacco and alcohol, but was he also on an amphetamine—Benzedrine perhaps?

She was not tall, this woman who had been lithe, willow-shoot thin, quick-witted and quick on her feet. She was rounded in the shoulders, chunky in the hips about which an off-white smock-coat's ties were bound, and though she hesitated, she couldn't stop herself from saying, ‘I always knew you'd come back.'

‘Lucie, I need your help.'

‘When have you not?' Was it really Hermann? That scar down the left side of his face from eye to chin—how had he come by such a thing? That graze across a brow to which she had clamped cold compresses to bring down a raging fever? A bullet, she tersely nodded to herself, but there was no longer that mischief she had seen in those blue eyes of his that were now faded, no laughter anymore. He was harried, desperate and obviously on the run again.

Kohler set the mortar and pestle she had been using aside, took them right from her as she heard herself telling the morning's patients to please wait but a few moments. ‘An old friend.'

Deliberately he blocked their view by filling the doorway, knowing though that, like all who ventured here, they would strain to listen.

‘I haven't much time, Lucie. I meant to come back after that other war. I really did.'

‘But didn't.'