Carnival (40 page)

The carving he would put at the top—
ah,
oui, oui
, that would be best. ‘Boudicca who rode again and with such bravery.'

A bead of solder, a swatch of grey-green cloth, the cutthroat and partly masticated, bloodstained ball of papier-mâché followed. The phosphorescent swastika button a uniform would need was next, and the pieces from broken phonograph recordings of
Das Rheingold und Die Walküre
. The personals columns from the newspapers Hermann had recovered were laid to one side, especially that of 20 January 1943's
Münchner Neueste Nachrichten
.

The pocket watch was placed there too, and the earring. The copy of
Schöne Mädchen in der Natur
was followed by the rusty nail and pebble against which it had been ground. Torn photos from home were added, those of Paulette Thomas who would soon receive notice of her loss. To these he added the Lagermark, the two rose-coloured buttons, the wedding ring with its Gallic scrollwork, the notebook and lastly its torn corner-scrap with the chemical formulae and equations.

So many items, the bits and pieces of lives lost, their last register. Should he burn them all? Could he leave the investigation unfinished or go it alone?

‘Eugène Thomas,' he said, sipping from the pot and blowing on the water. ‘Renée Ekkehard commits “suicide” and this has a profound effect on Sophie Schrijen, as it must have had on Victoria. But Sophie's the one closest to Eugène and they talk—they must have. He's been sentenced to death by his comrades and, though he would not have been told this by them, would have sensed it. She tells him Renée was murdered. He already knows why that has happened and sees no hope even in the plan of he and his fellow prisoners, all of whom would most surely be arrested, interrogated and then executed. He knows only that the killing has just begun.

‘I don't think anyone murdered him, Hermann,' he said. Though Hermann was gone from him, it did help to talk to him just as it had with Renée Ekkehard and Eugène Thomas. ‘Our chemist would have been in daily contact with Löwe Schrijen. He would have known that for him, it was only a matter of days. We'll have to leave it at a suicide, a touch of doubt I don't like, of course—
merde alors
, it's not in my nature but with no chance of my interviewing either of those two
Postzensuren
, his laboratory assistants either, or any of his combine, what else can I do, and what, please, has happened to those men?

‘At some point after Eugène Thomas's death, Sophie Schrijen put these two buttons into his pockets. She must have wanted us to look closely at your colonel, Hermann, and to not accept everything he would tell us, must also have wanted to distract us from that father of hers. Brokenhearted, she had rebelled at everything she and her comrades had stood for, was in fear for her own life, and had been told, I'm certain, that she had no other choice.'

They would never know for sure, of course. Like so many aspects of this war, too much was bound to remain unanswered.

The carved staghorn buttons the colonel had left lying on his desk were here too, with the three beechwood bobbins still wound with their thread, and the swatch of wood-fibre silk.

‘Raymond Maillotte didn't kill Eugène Thomas. He told you, Hermann, that they hadn't decided on who was to carry out the sentence or how.'

Warmed a little now, St-Cyr took to searching through the diagrams those men had drawn and when he had one of the fête, longed for tobacco and his pipe, and for time to pursue the investigation.

‘There was to have been a brazier at each table, Hermann.' He pointed them out. ‘The torches at either side of the booths. Torches dipped in tallow and beeswax, and containing guncotton no doubt.'

The torches were to have been held in place by ropes that ran from side to side above the Wheel of Fortune's booth and that of the
Jeu de massacre
, but those ropes were then to be linked to another that made its way to the back above the table that separated the two booths. ‘When lit by the Gauleiter­ Wagner and Löwe Schrijen, Hermann, they would have torched the sky before toppling inward to shower flaming debris­ onto the pyramids of papier-mâché balls to trigger the trinitrophenol.

‘Boudicca,' he said, and picking up the little carving, held it a moment as if undecided, for always he liked to have a memento of each investigation, yet now of course, there would be no sense in that. ‘
Adieu
, my queen. I regret that I met you only in my imagination.' Dropping it into the stove, he quickly pocketed the watch and tossed everything else in except for the ampoules and the cutthroat. These he would keep.

‘For later,
mon vieux
. For later.'

At first light, the memories came hard and fast, but it was bitterly cold. Hermann would have said, Why wait out here when you can stay by the stove?

Hermann …

So hard was the frost, a three-metre thick blanket of icy fog shrouded the carnival and adjacent fields, the Kastenwald also. When sunlight finally touched the topmost girders of the Ferris wheel, St-Cyr started out. He would have to find Hermann's body, would have to see that it was laid out properly and covered with something. He couldn't leave him and simply walk away to be arrested.

Silent as always at such times, three ravens took flight. Startled, he watched them, the heart racing. Would they lead him to Hermann, had they pecked out his eyes?

All too soon he lost sight of the Phantom Queen. ‘It's that kind of place, Hermann,' he said.

One brightly painted iron standard lay on the ground, and then another, and through the fog, he could see that they were bent and twisted and blood-spattered. The village cop, the priest, the bailiff and schoolteacher. ‘Hermann,' he cried out. ‘Hermann, where are you?'

As if he could have answered.

A crater was all that was left of the wagon that had held the
Jeu de massacre
. Debris was scattered. Sophie Schrijen lacked both face and hands and most of her clothing. Had Hermann found her, he would have gone right out of his mind. Frost-numbed Sûreté fingers dragged a bit of frozen canvas over her, St-Cyr making the sign of the Cross, though would it do any good? ‘God has forgotten us, mademoiselle. The SS won't. At 1000 hours they'll be here in force.'

Sounds were muffled, blood was everywhere in the snow, this life of theirs, no life at all. ‘Hermann,' he said.

The sound grew but faintly, and when he stumbled toward it, he passed by the House of Mirrors, much of which had been flattened, found the Ideal Caterpillar ghostlike in the fog, the Noah's Ark no better.

‘Colonel,' he heard himself saying as Rasche got out of that little car of his.

There wasn't any sense in asking St-Cyr where Kohler was. It was written in the way he stood, the tears that were frozen to his cheeks. ‘Get in and I'll take you to the station at Rouffach. It's to the south of Kolmar where, hopefully, you won't be stopped from boarding.'

‘Not until we find my partner. You sent Herr Lutze out here on that Saturday afternoon but didn't bother to discover Renée Ekkehard's body until the following Tuesday?'

‘I needed time.'

‘You knew Victoria Bödicker would come out here on that Sunday, that Alain Schrijen would also have been here with his sister.'

‘He killed Renée, didn't he? He and that father of his.'

‘They had to stop them, Colonel, and those three women knew it and lived in terror until the one begged her friend to help her, that friend now having paid for it.'

‘And the other?'

‘Why not come and see for yourself?'

The ravens had returned. Two of them flew silently from the body while a third watched from a nearby branch at the very edge of the Kastenwald where a field-grey giant madly shooed them away, waving arms and gloved hands but making no sound whatsoever.

Still dazed, Hermann broke through the edge of the woods. Wandering uncertainly toward them, he looked frightened, lost, puzzled—ah, so many things—had bound his head with his scarf, had pulled the collar of his greatcoat up and had buttoned it tightly. Bloodstains were everywhere on him; the cuts and nicks having congealed. ‘Hermann,' said St-Cyr. ‘Hermann …'

‘He's in shock,' grunted Rasche. ‘He can't hear you.'

‘He's frozen. He's hungry and exhausted, has had nothing to eat but Benzedrine and snow.'

‘Get him into the car. Get him out of here now. You mustn't miss that train. This is perfect. Löwe Schrijen will cry foul about the
résistants
and terrorism and claim his daughter had to put a stop to it but died in the process.'

‘Colonel, you came out here to find out what had happened to us and to them.'

‘Listen, you, get in. With luck we'll make it and you'll be well on your way to the frontier before Meyer and the others find out. I'll stall them all I can.'

‘Papers … The
Ausweise
and safe-conducts we'll need?'

‘In your grip, your weapons also. Alain Schrijen found he had no choice but to give them to me.'

‘
Danke
, Colonel. It … it was the least you could do.'

‘There are some sandwiches and a vacuum flask of soup Yvonne insisted she pack in case you had …'

‘Solved the matter and survived? Settled it as best we could, given the circumstances? But, please, what has happened to those men who were being held in
Straf?
'

‘When I sent the ones I had here to the front, I sent them along to stalags. I couldn't let Löwe Schrijen pry answers from them.'

‘Be honest, Colonel. You needed the insurance their continued presence on this earth would provide to keep him from pointing the finger at yourself for allowing it all to happen.'

‘He'll have dealt with Deiss and Paulus.'

‘No, Colonel, you will already have had that taken care of. Seeing as Herr Lutze did not accompany you this morning, I assume he has …'

‘Silenced them. As it turns out, another “terrorist” attack.'

‘And the watchmaker?'

‘Yvonne insisted I send him to relatives in Provence.'

At Belfort there was an hour-long stopover. Leading Hermann by the hand, St-Cyr took him into the station and sat him down next to the stationmaster's stove. Everyone went out of their way to be kind. ‘Shell-shocked,' they whispered. ‘An RAF bomb. A stray one, hung up in the bomb bay and finally jettisoned.'

Cigarettes, one after another, were found and lit and placed between his lips, those faded blue eyes still vacant, the continued silence a tragedy to compound tragedies.

In silence, they ate. What Hermann needed most was sleep.

‘Don't even think of it, Louis. If you feed me Evipan, I'll never thaw out.'

‘Hermann …'

‘
Shh!
You're across the frontier, aren't you? You're on your way back to Paris.
Paris
, Louis.'

Ah,
merde
, he had been faking!

At Dijon a telex from Gestapo Boemelburg, Hermann's boss at 11 rue des Saussaies, caught up with them.
Return HQ immediately. Streets being terrorized by blackout crime. Heil Hitler
.

A tapestry … that's what this life of theirs was like. A wall-hanging to keep out the cold until the fortress on high was finally taken and its occupants thrown from the walls.

Historical Note

Hermann was incorrect when he stated that God Himself could not have escaped from Natzweiler-Struthof. On 4 August 1942, five prisoners—a Czech, an Austrian, a Pole, a German and a Frenchman of Alsatian birth—after considerable planning, stole SS uniforms and a car and drove out of the camp. The first two made it to England where, in January 1943 the Czech government-in-exile was given a full report of what was happening at the camp, news of which was then broadcast over the BBC. The Pole was imprisoned in Spain but later managed to join the Free Polish Army, the Alsatian Frenchman joining the Free French in Tunisia. Only the German, a ‘political', was captured and returned to the quarry where, in November 1942 under Josef Kramer's orders, it took three attempts to hang him. Details of the ‘experiments' and the involvement of the doctors, all of whom were professors, have been documented and need no further comment here.

Four young women, all of them
N und Ns
, one French, two British, and one whose name was never recorded, were executed on the night of 6 July 1944 and cremated in the camp's furnace. Although the subsequent War Crimes Trial went to great lengths to establish whether Evipan or phenol had been injected, no firm conclusion could be reached due in large part to all the lies. Phenol was, however, used at Auschwitz and at Bergen-Belsen, where Kramer became Kommandant in April 1944.

At the time of
Carnival
, the overflow building across from the ski lodge would not have been surrounded by the barbed wire that later became necessary when an experimental gas chamber was installed there in the summer of 1943 and the ski lodge reserved for visiting personnel. Natzweiler-Struthof, though small in comparison to other such camps, had up to forty-seven work camps and probably at any one time, about 200,000 prisoners under its umbrella but also tested methods of killing that were subsequently used in the much larger camps. In total, perhaps as many as 45,000 men passed through the quarry camp itself, perhaps as many as one-half never leaving it. Many
N und Ns
from all over occupied Europe were sent there, among them nearly 5,000 from France, as well as groups of up to a hundred men and women from other camps who were then used in the ‘experiments' but had been arrested solely because of their race.

One last point needs to be stated. During the background research, brief reference was found of a young Alsatian girl who spoke fluent
Deutsch
as well as French, knew the terrain extremely well, and had guided escaped French POWs from the Reich through to the Vosges. Eventually she was arrested and sent from prison to prison in Germany until finally ending up in France, in the women's section of Fresnes Prison. Was she released or executed? The author of this report, a prisoner herself, could give no definite answer, only the slim hope that perhaps the girl had been released. The date was between April and June of 1943 and one of the girl's brothers had already been executed at Fresnes, hence her having been sent there. As one who was related to an
N und N
and guilty, too, of an act of ‘terrorism', it is doubtful she would have survived and I have to wonder if she wasn't that unknown young woman who died at Natzweiler-Struthof on 6 July 1944. The names of the others were Miss Vera Leigh, Miss Diana Rowden, and Miss Denise Borrell, all of whom were imprisoned at Fresnes before being sent to the quarry camp.

Well after I had written the above, I finally came across the identity of this fourth victim: Sonia Olschanesky, a Frenchwoman who had become a courier for the British F (French) Section. Because she had not been commissioned into the British armed forces, as she would have been if she had fled to Britain and then come back, her name had been left off the monument to the others, all of whom, I am certain, would have wanted it to be there.