Carnival (39 page)

They must have been terrified it would explode in transit, would have hidden it in the wagon with the torches and all the other pieces of the
Jeu de massacre
Renée had loved. Renée who had been so special to them.

‘Hermann, there's no sign of the Mauser. Mademoiselle, you had best …'

‘Louis, she's gone. I didn't even get a chance to tell her we'd do everything we could to see that she escaped and wasn't harmed.'

The two sets of tracks were divergent, the one heading from the tourer toward the House of Mirrors and its wagons. The other was elusive: now to the ruin of a round stall between the Noah's Ark and the
Salon Carousel
, a ruin whose once candy-­striped canvas tilt had shed rain and sun from the suckers who had attempted its hoopla of square pedestals which would have been but a whisper shy of being too big for the hoops to drop over. These little posts littered the snow-covered rubbish among scrolled and gilded panel boards that had peeled and faded.

From here, this second set of tracks, having picked its defiant way through that rubbish, headed for another stall, somewhat closer to the
Salon Carousel
. Hermann played his torch fitfully over the ruin until it settled on the tracks, as once garishly painted, plaster clown heads stared emptily up at them with gaping mouths.

‘Ping-Pong balls,' he muttered. ‘The clowns would all have been ranked in line, eyes to the right or left, or facing straight ahead. You feed a ball into the mouths of the ones you think will win and the ball drops down a gullet slot and either rings a bell or doesn't.'

‘Carpet-sweepers, duvets, tureens and chamber pots as prizes, but few if any winners. Don't linger.'

‘My Gerda used to love going to carnivals, fêtes and fairs. We would have such a time of it, the two of us.'

The tracks, when again found, led into the depths of the
Salon Carousel
, their torch beams flickering as they passed over the once gaily coloured menagerie. A band organ had been pulverized by the budding musicians among the local tribe of farm children. A stallion now wore charcoal horn-rimmed spectacles, the swan-chairs, the crayoned grimaces of white-winged witches.

‘Louis, if we ever get out of this, we're going to have to get out of France. Neither of us will be allowed to stay, not now, and you know it.'

‘The Résistance …'

‘Will be after both of us, and if not them, the SS and Gestapo, and if not them, the collabos, and if not them, the
Bonzen
, and if not those …'

‘The French Gestapo of the rue Lauriston and others.'

Gangsters the SS and Gestapo had let out of the Santé, Fresnes and other such prisons and had put to work. Gangsters, several of whom Louis had consigned to those very prisons.

‘Come on,
mon vieux
,' said St-Cyr, ‘we can discuss it later.'

‘There won't be time and you know it.'

They shook hands, and through the darkness, looked steadily at each other. Hermann had taken far more Benzedrine than he should. The hand was warm but quivering until gripped more firmly. ‘
Merci bien, mon ami
, let us count on each other.'

‘As always.'

‘Yes, of course.'

‘You didn't answer Victoria when she asked if you felt Sophie had killed Renée.'

‘There was no need and she knew it.'

‘And now …'

‘
Un moment!
'

‘The
Tonneau de l'amour
, Louis.'

Victoria Bödicker had fallen and the startled cry she had given was repeated, the echoes torn from it. ‘She's been leading us away from what she has in mind, Hermann.'

‘The
Jeu de massacre
, but she'd not have cried out like that had she not been terrified.'

‘And followed by Sophie?'

Who must have heard the Citroën's approach and then watched as they had got out of the car. ‘That Mauser pistol, Louis …'

Light spilled from a canted doorway behind the long, dark silhouette of the Barrel of Love. It gave small shadows to footprints that shouldn't have been here had he been doing his job, felt Kohler. Hesitantly he touched Louis on the shoulder, heard him suck in an impatient breath and knew that this partner of his was trying his damnedest to figure out what best to do.

‘Hermann, find another way in. Let me confront the Mademoiselle Schrijen.'

Above the spindled, horn-winged arch over the broken entrance, drunken letters gave the name in French of Dr. Bonnet's Travelling Museum of Anatomy.

Light seeped from among splintered panel boards whose faded, peeling posters gave the lie of pseudoscientific credentials, once luridly dyed wall hangings portraying obscure surgical operations: Transfusion of Goat's Blood; et cetera, et cetera.

‘Hermann, leave me. Either Sophie Schrijen has set the lantern down to distract us or to shine it at her friend.'

‘Take care. I mean it, Louis.'

‘You also.'

‘Batteries okay?'

‘
Hermann
, there isn't time!'

They parted. A last glance over the shoulder gave the blocky, dark silhouette of Louis as he quickly ducked into the entrance, totally committed and utterly reliable …

St-Cyr drew in another breath. Everywhere he looked there was broken glass. Cork-stoppered bottles had once held deformed and perfectly formed fetuses that had been drenched in formalin. Jars of the same had held pickled organs: the heart, the lungs, liver and kidneys, the brain of ‘a real live man,' the reproductive organs also.

Against a broken, blue-, white- and gold-tiled mural of a gowned and bearded ancient Hippocrates holding a sick child, the hourglass of time had shed its last grains of sand.

Cobwebs caught the gently falling snow as they stretched from spine to spine of shattered glass. Autumn's dead leaves, blown in from the nearby Kastenwald, were everywhere. Stains were everywhere: grey, dark red, brown, the shards of glass most often fogged and smeared, the light catching everything that had fallen from the displays.

The battery-powered lantern, its stiff wire handle upright, was on the ground at Sophie Schrijen's feet. Caught in its spotlight, Victoria Bödicker stood well out in the middle of this exhibit whose roof had fallen in. The canted cross-poles, with their rotten, now frozen canvas, were all around her, her shadow large and looming over a still standing wall whose hangings cried out:
Embryologie et Maternité
and the Damnation of Illicit Sex.

Kohler couldn't stop shaking. Caught in the beam of his torch, the skulls that littered the floor of this little room he was in, this cul-de-sac, spoke for all those he had had to see in the trenches of that other war. Shells screamed overhead as if he was right back at Vieil-Armand. Thrown up, the stench of rotting flesh, of blood, guts, brains and shattered granite mingled with those of mildewed earth and spruce gum. Panicking, he was suddenly terrified he would die without ever seeing Gerda again, wept as the skulls accused him, cursed him, mocked him; those also from all the murders he'd had to investigate.

‘YOU KILLED HER, VICTORIA!' shrieked Sophie Schrijen, the sound of her voice breaking over him.

‘MADEMOISELLE, SHE DID NOT MURDER RENÉE EKKEHARD!'

Louis … was that Louis shouting?

‘SHE DID! MY BROTHER DIDN'T!'

‘But could and would have.'

Louis had said that.

‘MY FATHER DIDN'T GET ANYONE TO KILL HER EITHER!'

‘But would have seen to it. Now, please, mademoiselle, put the gun down.'

‘INSPECTOR, STAY WHERE YOU ARE!'

Ah,
merde
, she was going to shoot Louis.

‘Sophie, please listen to me.'

That had been Victoria.

‘Sophie, you know how despondent she was.'

‘A SUICIDE, YOU SAID!'

‘MADEMOISELLE, THE GUN,
S'IL VOUS PLAÎT
!'

Louis must have moved closer. He'd have his hand stretched out to take that gun …

‘Give it to him, Sophie. He and Herr Kohler will try to help us.'

Postcards littered the skull-strewn floor at Kohler's feet: stained, frozen, faded photos of cadavers swathed in blood-soaked, white muslin or not; wounds … horribly gaping wounds. One who'd just had his head blown off—how many times had he seen just such a thing? Another without his limbs. No morphia, the poor bastard just staring emptily up at him like others he'd seen. Deformities too: twins linked at the hip, the shoulder or trunk but also pornographic shots the doctor must have sold on the sly. Shots of beautiful young girls, those of boys too. Several displays of
sadomasochisme …

A shaving brush.

Kohler shook his head to clear it. The brush stood upright on a little shelf before the splinters of a mirror. A drinking glass held a toothbrush. An all but empty bottle of grass-green shaving lotion held clots of last autumn's flies. A tin of boot grease had been left in haste. Regulation issue and if found by others, an automatic sentence of death for Renée Ekkehard, Victoria Bödicker and Sophie Schrijen unless
Vati
could intervene.

Shards of glass were almost everywhere, but near the shaving brush there were none of them. The chipped enamel of the tin basin was whisper clean. ‘Louis …' he muttered. ‘They hid those boys in here until Sophie could drive them to the farm and send them on their way.'

There was a chair, a stool, the dust of cigarette ashes. A key hung on a nail—
Ach,
how naive of them. It was to the wagon they had used as a field office. At night, the one or two they were moving would have crawled out of here and had something to eat in that office. They would never have stayed long at the carnival, but as sure as he was standing here, Martin Caroff, Eugène Thomas and the others had begun to notice that something was going on.

‘Sophie,' pleaded Victoria, ‘Renée didn't want to live.'

‘YOU DRUGGED HER!'

‘Mademoiselle, your lover took ampoules of Evipan from the SS hospital at Natzweiler-Struthof,' said Louis.

‘YOU CUT YOUR FINGER WHEN YOU BROKE THE TOP OFF ONE OF THOSE THINGS, VICTORIA!'

‘Mademoiselle Schrijen, you found the sticking plaster she had used. You found the lipstick also, with which she had written the suicide note your lover begged her to write. Now, please, the gun.'

‘INSPECTOR, IF YOU COME ANY CLOSER, I WILL HAVE TO KILL YOU!'

Louis was going to try to stop her. Kohler knew it, felt it, would have to get to them, have to distract her …

‘Mademoiselle, your brother came out here on Saturday, 30 January, to kill her but she got away from him. The deserters or escaped prisoners of war the three of you had expected were not here either. Renée then went well to the east, to the Totenkopf.'

‘She found the hut empty, Sophie,' said Victoria. ‘They weren't there, and neither was Herr Springer's brother. She had skied and walked and had even hitched a lift in a Wehrmacht lorry all for nothing, and had then made her way back here because she had nowhere else to go. Nowhere, Sophie.'

‘Alain … Alain had told Father where to find them, Victoria. Renée must have said something at Natzweiler.
Vati
…
Vati
, saw to it that they were stopped.'

‘WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME, SOPHIE?'

‘I couldn't. By then it was too late. None of them were interrogated. They were all simply taken out and shot. Herr Deiss and Herr Paulus did it for Father, for money.'

Sophie Schrijen stood with the lantern at her feet; Louis within two metres of her now and simply not close enough.

‘She was exhausted, Sophie, and convinced that the only way she could save you was to take her own life.'

‘You're lying. You thought only of yourself.'

‘She begged me to help her.'

‘You sat with her,' said Louis. ‘You had a cigarette, a little schnapps, something she didn't really care for. You talked. You rummaged about in that tin box where the three of you kept the bits of costume jewellery that you'd found and took out the earring.'

‘Renée had wanted so badly to find its mate, Inspector, we pretended that we had. She cupped it in her hands, held it to the light and pressed it against her cheek, and as she became sleepier and sleepier, she said, “Tell Sophie to try to forgive me.”'

‘By committing suicide, Mademoiselle Schrijen, your lover felt that your father would do everything he could to protect you.'

‘But not myself, Sophie. Not me. Renée and I both knew that it was only a matter of time until he sent someone for me.'

‘LOUIS, DON'T!'

The Mauser leapt, the sound of the shot reverberating as Victoria was knocked off her feet and thrown back. She cried out for her mother, cried repeatedly for the woman to come quickly. Cried for all the things she hadn't done, for the children she would never have, for Blaise Oberkircher and for forgiveness, but cried it ever more faintly in darkness.

Gently St-Cyr lowered her to the ground, having held her at the last. ‘Hermann … ?' he managed.

Hermann had gone after Sophie Schrijen but that could only mean … ‘HERMANN, LET HER GO! HERMANN, PLEASE!'

Two shots were fired and then another, the blast smashing things all around him as he cringed and held on to Victoria Bödicker. In wave after wave, the sound of the explosion came until a last shower of broken glass and other debris had finally settled.

In the ever-deepening hush that followed, he bowed his head and let the tears fall. ‘Hermann …' he said. ‘Hermann, I needed you. Together we might have made it through this lousy war; alone, I have no chance.'

Little by little the snow in the pot began to melt. St-Cyr held his hands to the stove. Alone in this world, in this carnival, this field office wagon, he waited. He would have a tisane of hot water. Miraculously the three ampoules of Evipan that Victoria Bödicker had handed over had been spared. He would set them on the drawing table in a row beneath that of the liqueur glasses Hermann had found.