Gypsy (19 page)

It would do no good to lie and hadn't Gabrielle said Herr Kohler could be trusted if necessary? ‘We … we don't know where he is. None of us. He's … he's simply not co-operating.'

‘Gone off on his own, has he?'

‘Yes, and obviously with Tshaya, though this we did not anticipate and … and had had no inclination of. How could we have?'

He'd best get it clear. ‘But you met with him on the fourteenth when he arrived in Paris. How the hell did you even know he'd be on that train?'

‘We
didn't
know anything, Inspector! Jani … The first I knew of his arrival was his knock at my door. He said … All right, he said he'd escaped to England in 1940 and that … that the British had parachuted him into France. Could I keep him for a day or two? That was all he'd ask. He was desperate. I couldn't refuse. The whole thing was crazy. I'd our son to think of but … but Janwillem was already in the flat. I did not know who, if anyone, might have noticed him or if, by sending him away, his presence would not be fixed in memory. The concierge …
Mon Dieu
, that one's a collaborator if ever there was one.' She shrugged. ‘You see the dilemma I was in.'

She was all innocence. None of it was her fault. ‘So you kept him until …?' asked Kohler, pleasantly enough for Giselle to be startled by his manner.

‘Until the late afternoon of the seventeenth.' This wasn't true, of course, thought Nana, but somehow she had to protect the others.

‘Then he must have seen your son.'

She would have to smile. ‘Yes … Yes, for the first time. He was very pleased. Our Jani was beside himself with delight. The father he had always heard about had at last come to see him. They played for hours. They …'

‘Forget it,' snorted Kohler impatiently. ‘When we took you home from the Avia Club Gym you told my partner to ask De Vries, when we caught him, why he had tried to kill the son he had never seen.'

She touched her chest. ‘Did I?'

Kohler nodded curtly towards a far table she could see well enough. ‘Were those two couples at the dinner party the SS and their friends threw in your former villa on the night of the eleventh?'

He would only ask it of them if she didn't tell him. ‘Yes.'

‘And you still don't know who they are?'

‘Should I?'

Oona was staring at her wine and keeping very still; Giselle had swallowed tightly.

‘Then listen,' said Kohler sadly. ‘The one with the cigarette in its ivory holder, the polished jackboots and the blue-eyed blonde with the overhang is Oberstleutnant Willi Löwenstein, head of Funkabwehr Paris and France; that's radio counter-espionage in case you're interested.'

‘And the one with the brunette?' she managed, her voice faint.

‘Horst Uhrig, his Gestapo counterpart. They're sizing you up, Mademoiselle Thélème, and that can only mean one thing. They've buried their petty jealousies and have agreed to work together. Now you tell me why?'

‘I … I don't know.'

‘I think you do.'

The fire had long since gone to dust. At 4.40 a.m. and out of tobacco, St-Cyr quietly pulled on his overcoat and found his scarf and gloves.

Suzanne-Cécilia Lemaire slept in her chair with arms folded beneath her head on the table. Had she been emptied of her secrets? he wondered, and thought it far too unlikely.

But she had revealed that the house on the rue Poliveau had been essential for its closeness to the Jardin des Plantes, and had told him of the wireless transceiver she had built and had kept hidden in the zebra house.

Two messages had come in from London at 1.50 a.m. on the fifteenth. The first had dealt with the parents of Nanette Vernet, the child-heiress who had lost her friends in the Sandman murders. The second had dealt with the parachuting of the Gypsy into France near Tours on the night of the thirteenth, an untruth she was not yet aware of. But it was the delay between the messages – several seconds – and the signature of the sender that had troubled her enough to confess.

‘The first was very clear, fast and sure,' she had said. ‘It was what I had become accustomed to, but the second was hesitant, then fast, then surer, the touch firmer at the last, you understand, but it left me thinking … ah! what can I say when they are only faint signals in the darkness of the night? I felt it different but the news it brought had to be conveyed to the others at once.'

She had packed everything away and had braved the curfew, had cycled to the Club Mirage to inform Gabrielle who had contacted Nana Thélème later that day, but by then, of course, all of them must have known De Vries was in town. Even now they were each hedging their bets and revealing only so much.

Three women and by association, Hermann and himself and, yes, Oona and Giselle. It was not good. Indeed, it was a disaster.

‘
London
' had used the code name of Zebra. A coincidence perhaps, if one believed in such things.

Fate if one did not.

At 5 a.m. twenty-five degrees of frost was unkind, the rue Laurence-Savart glacial in its darkness. Kohler let the Citroën's engine idle. Far up the street a faint blue pinprick revealed the workaday world had begun.

Verdammt
! what was he to do? Disassociate himself from Louis? Sever a friendship that had begun in the late summer of 1940? Take the side of the Occupier no matter how wrong it felt?

‘Get out before it's too late,' he said, echoing the thoughts of many no doubt, for the war news wasn't good. ‘Try for Spain. Giselle and Oona first and then myself. False papers, good ones. Money …?' He had none but what was in his pocket. Like gypsies the world over, he had always spent when he had had it to spend.

‘Expenses,' he said and thought to light up a last cigarette cadged from Nana, deciding instead to break it in half. ‘Louis will want a smoke. He always does. First thing.'

In spite of being from opposite sides of the war and old enemies at that, they
had
got on and they
did
work well together.

‘Too well,' he confessed. ‘It has to end. Berlin are telling me this. Boemelburg too. To them, it's time for me to stand up and be counted.'

Like a cold wind from the Russian steppes, Herr Max had been sent to bring home the point, though it had yet to be stated. ‘It's been a set-up ever since that son of a bitch let the Gypsy out of jail. He was aware the Gestapo had bugged Gabrielle's dressing-room. He knew there was a clandestine wireless set sending signals from Paris and that the Gestapo's Radio Listeners and the Abwehr's had located it. What better, then, than to sweep them all into the net by playing a little
Fimkspiel
? A radio game. Answer the signals by feeding in a message the terrorists would want clearly to accept. But now Berlin must be crying for Engelmann's head if he doesn't get the bastard back and fast! And now the
réseau
must be tearing their collective hair and wondering what to do.'

8,600,000 francs in cash from the office safe at Cartier's and never mind that it had been Gabrielie's money; 682,000 francs from the Gare Saint-Lazare, to say nothing of what the General-major Wehrle had had in his safe at the Ritz and all the rest. It was enough to tempt a poor detective and to tear him from friendship. Giselle and Oona could buy a villa on the Costa del Sol. There'd be no need for that little shop or bar he'd been thinking about. Giselle could have her babies, Oona too, if she wanted. None of them need work another day. Diamonds and sapphires, gold coins and old stamps.

When Louis joined him, the Sûreté's first words were, ‘Don't even think of it, Hermann. Things have gone too far this time. They won't let you escape to Spain.'

‘I didn't think they would.'

‘Good. Boemelburg wants to see us at first light.'

‘That's hours away. Hey, we can be in Tours by then if we hurry.'

‘The roads …'

‘Fuck the roads. There's no traffic anyway. Hang on.'

At noon a wet snow clung to everything and the black overcoats of forty years ago were as glued to it in misery. The heart of Tours, its life, its beauty, its charm had been charred and gutted. Down by the Paris-Bordeaux bridge, the white-stone, blackened wall of a sixteenth-century mansion still retained the sumptuous foliage of Renaissance carvers. Gallo-Roman walls and medieval graveyards had been thrown up as by the hand of a demented archaeologist. Twelfth-, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century half-timbered houses had simply been consumed.

‘Incendiaries,' breathed Kohler sadly. ‘Stukas.'

Düsseldorf, London, Abbeville, Köln and many more cities and towns had had their firestorms of varying severity. It was still happening. Gone were the quaint little crooked streets where a person could delight in echoes of the past. For three days and nights the city had burned. On 21 June 1940 the provisional government which had fled to here, journeyed to Compiégne to sign the Armistice in the very same railway coach that, twenty-two years earlier, had seen Germany surrender.

‘Marianne loved this city. To her, our short honeymoon was the one great adventure of her life.'

It would do no good to remind Louis of the Hauptmann Steiner. War was war. Lovers came and went. Friendships were instant, seldom lasting. ‘Cheer up, eh? We got here.'

‘
Grâce â Dieu
. Oh
bien sûr
, the Occupation has cleared the roads of traffic – you have said so yourself – but at 120 kilometres an hour, while passing a convoy in blinding snow, was it necessary to lean on the horn?'

‘There were only two convoys.'

‘
Seven
! Can you not count?'

‘Hey, relax, eh? I'll make it right. I'll buy you a pastis as soon as we can find a trough.'

‘It's another of your alcohol-free days or had you forgotten that as well?'

‘I'll use my Gestapo shield. I'll threaten them.'

It would do no good to argue. Hermann always had to have the last word. They turned left off the rue Nationale, passing through more devastation. Here the Wehrmacht had simply bulldozed the rubble aside and had dynamited the shakiest of walls. There were no glimpses of the Loire. It would be grey in any case. Marianne had loved bathing in it. She had laughed, had smiled at him and had said, ‘Tonight, Jean-Louis, we shall make us a baby.'

It hadn't happened then. He'd been summoned back to Paris and had been sent to the south, to Perpignan and yet another murder, the hatchet slayings of wild goats and equally wild women. ‘Ever since then I have ceased to trust shepherds,' he said aloud, baffling his partner and causing Hermann to toss his head in alarm.

‘You think it too,' said the Kripo. ‘They damned well lied, didn't they – Nana Thélème and the Generalmajor Wehrle? There's no prospector, nothing, Louis. That house he lived in was destroyed during the blitzkrieg!'

Not so. On place Plumereau the ancient houses crowded close as if in defiance of centuries of human idiocy. Some were half-timbered, others faced with the white tufa common to Touraine. Beneath an unwelcoming sky, their dizzily pitched roofs fell to attic dormers above two storeys and ground-floor shops.

The feet of nervous pigeons too hungry to escape were mired in wet snow. An old woman in black trickled scant crumbs she could not spare from a withered hand.

Other people were about but tried to take no notice of the Citroën and its two occupants. A
gazogène
lorry perfumed the dank air with the pungency of green willow, the warren of tubes and cylinders on its roof banging and clanging as it farted its way across the square to disappear up a street.

Timidly St-Cyr approached the woman. The Sûreté … Paris … she'd have noted both even though her back was still turned to them. ‘Madame …?'

‘
Oui
?' she snapped, letting the last of the crumbs fall.

‘A Monsieur Jacqmain …'

‘
What'she done
?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Women. Fancy women. Late comings and goings. Whores if you ask me.'

Ah
merde
… ‘We only want to know where he lives.'

She jerked her head. ‘Above the Boucherie Leplat. Next to Au Petit Moka which has, alas, been closed for the Duration due to the extreme shortage of coffee for those of us who haven't the money to afford it.'

‘What fancy women?'

‘Two from Paris.
Très belles, très gentilles
. The blonde went in at noon. The raven-haired one came by train and followed later. Then that one went out and into the
marchand de couleurs
of Monsieur Gabon.'

It was too much to resist, and he sighed. ‘What did the raven-haired one buy?'

Ah! she had their interest at last. ‘Flypapers in winter? Sufficient for six summers of infestation? And what, please, are decent citizens to do when the flies visit us again?'

‘Flypapers?'

‘Is that not just what I said?' Madame Horleau waited for a suitable apology and when one didn't arrive, she let the two of them have the last from her lips. ‘Monsieur Jacqmain has not left the house since the newspapers arrived from Paris, so I ask again, what has he done?'

They started out. The pigeons scattered. People took notice but tried not to let on. Everywhere the air was suddenly of trouble.

The house had a white, cut-stone façade, with its entry to the right. Directly above the butcher's shop, there was a wrought-iron Louis Philippe railing that enclosed a narrow balcony behind which there were two tall, tightly shuttered French windows. On the floor above, there were equal but unshuttered windows. Then, as the roof climbed to its peak, there were two large attic dormers, side by side and also tightly shuttered.

Beyond the hardware store next door, there was a hat factory with little business.

‘Louis, the flypapers … is it what I think?'

‘Perhaps but then … ah
mais alors, alors, mon vieux
, isn't it a little too early to say?'