Sandman (24 page)

‘They're gone. I know they are. A mother feels such things. They're buried by the roadside in unmarked graves, and it's an emptiness within me that will never go away.'

With his usual boisterousness, Hermann returned from using the telephone in the café down the street and said, ‘I held back on an all-points for Rébé simply because the SS-Attack Leader and artist Gerhardt Hasse is at home and expecting us, Louis, thanks to von Schaumburg. His friends over on the avenue Foch will try to shield him. They're worried about his interest in young girls. Apparently he can't get enough of them.'

Oh-oh.

Giselle wandered into the kitchen bundled in two overcoats, trousers, three pairs of Hermann's woollen socks, scarves, a toque and mittens. ‘It's freezing in here,' she said and pouted, having just got out of bed. ‘God is punishing me for cohabiting with the Occupier, especially one who is so patriotic towards the Conquered he will not ask for even a simple ration of coal!'

‘Giselle …'

‘Hermann, a moment,' cautioned Oona, and, taking the girl by the shoulders, sat her down at the table and began to warm coffee for her on the tiny hotplate that served for all cooking.

‘What do those tell you?' asked the girl suspiciously of the Tarot cards.

‘Trouble,' said the Sûreté, quickly gathering them up. ‘Much trouble.'

7

T
HE IMPASSE
M
AUBERT WAS ONE OF THOSE
narrow, dead-end streets that so delight the eye yet terrify the timid. Not far to the east of place Saint-André-des-Arts, and right near the quai de Montebello, it was not clean but was a half-hidden slot overtowered by ramshackle houses, some of which dated from the twelfth century. Walls were bowed out or in and all but naked of their covering plaster. Iron grilles defied entry, though not a shutter was in place. A street, then, of Balzac or Dumas, thought St-Cyr, with embrasures at eye level for the discharge of muskets.

But what struck the heart as they walked up the alley was the sight of a Daimler sedan facing them. Big, black, powerful and so obviously SS that Hermann hesitated.

A motorcycle courier had parked his bike just in front of the car and to the left. Narrow pavements on either side allowed only one person at a time to pass, and the house beyond that thing at the very end of the
impasse
rose up four storeys, windows two by two like an ancient god of warning.

‘Vouvray …' said Hermann and, pulling off a glove, gingerly felt the scar on his left cheek. What had begun as a nothing murder in the Forest of Fontainebleau had ended with their being hated by the SS.

And now here, again, they were coming face to face with the bastards. Berlin wouldn't like it, the avenue Foch would be in a rage—'Hey, that's why the courier's here,' he said. ‘Oberg's sent a love note to our friend ordering him to say nothing.'

Oberg was head of the SS in France, a former banana merchant, now with the power of life and death over everyone, themselves included.

They went on, each taking a side of the car, Hermann forgetting all about the glove he had removed. The car was ice-cold but utterly clean and so at odds with the street they threw a last look at it over a shoulder.

There was no lift.
Mon Dieu
, in a house like this, how could there be? But the staircase was steep and the sounds of their steps were many.

No concierge bothered them. That one had simply vanished.

The atelier was on the top floor. The door was open, their progress up the
impasse
had been observed, and at once the smell of turpentine, oil paints and canvas assaulted the nostrils.

Hasse had been busy. Stacks of canvases leant against whatever they could … a table leg, a wall, a chair. Others were hanging on the walls, masses of subdued colour, all greyish, all of smiling, laughing young girls of ten or twelve or fourteen years of age, no others.

He signed for whatever it was Oberg had sent over, and with the customary salute, the courier departed, contempt for them in the man's every look. Ah
merde
…

‘Gentlemen, it's good of you to pay me a visit. Come … come, please, yes? There are chairs somewhere. Uncover them—just set things aside or put them on the floor. At this time of day I have to have the light. You won't mind, I'm sure.'

Like a stork that urgently searches for its chimney upon which to nest, Hasse went through to the front of the house to a room so cluttered with canvases, brushes, rags, spatulas, palettes and tubes of paint, trays on trays of them, he could not at first decide where the chairs must be.

Then he found them and, uncovered at last, they were usable.

The stand-up easel he had been working at—one of several—held a half-finished sketch whose faces they could not fail to recognize.

There, as in life but in those same subdued tones, were Andrée Noireau and Nénette Vernet, an arm about each other's shoulders, laughing, having just thought up the greatest of jokes. They were running a three-legged race against themselves. The windblown leaves of October were everywhere.

‘What has happened is a tragedy,' he said. ‘I find I cannot bring myself to finish this painting.'

The Sandman … was he the Sandman?

The stork was tall and thin, all bones and with gaunt grey eyes that looked beyond the painting into the past, to Poland and the Blitzkrieg in the East and children running in the streets through shellfire until dead.

‘I have to work,' he said, pleading for understanding. ‘Someone
has
to record their moment. Otherwise life is far too short.'

The black, receding hair was brushed straight back from the brow, the cheeks were thin, the lower lip much thicker than the upper. The nose was full and sharp; a once battle-hardened, very, very tough man. A killer now reduced to this.

He was from Salzburg and, without being asked, readily admitted there was a concentration camp there for Gypsies and that he had sent children to it, children he had sketched. ‘It wasn't right of me, no matter what the Führer says.'

Louis found his voice. The SS things the child had found had not come from the house on the rue Chabanais but from here … ‘Is that why you let Nénette Vernet have some of your badges and medals?'

Stung, Hasse turned on him. ‘Why ask when I have just told vou I could not possibly want those things anymore?'

The scars were there but no wounds were visible. Instead Hasse emanated shell shock. Like a tripwire tied taut across a lonely forest road, he waited for the bomb within himself to explode.

‘What can I tell you?' he asked. His fingers trembled.

‘Are you under doctor's orders?' asked Louis.

‘
Yes!
'

‘Morphine?' asked Kohler. ‘Alcohol?'

‘Don't be impertinent! All I need is to sketch. My work absorbs me.' He gave a wry laugh. ‘What better escape than that of the artist? The world, but for the work at hand, has to be shut out, otherwise the piece simply does not get done and can never be satisfactory.'

‘Tell us what you can about Liline Chambert,' offered Louis, trying to be diplomatic.

Already they were suspicious of him, thought Hasse. Both were ill at ease, as they should be with the SS! ‘She was lonely and distressed about money and other things, and knew I was no threat to her. She did find it hard to reconcile my killing of children—yes, I admit it and did so to her. It was in conflict with my sketches but she understood I had suffered greatly. We met in a life-drawing class at the Grande-Chaumière. The mannequins on that day were children—three boys and a girl—but I had drawn only the girl. She said I had captured the child's apprehension, the worry in her eyes over her brothers who often strayed from their poses and fidgeted far too much for the drawing master. Their mother badly needed the pittance they would be paid, and the child was afraid it would not be forthcoming. Even at such a tender age, she had understood her duty.'

Again it was Louis who, lost in thought and wary, said, ‘But you sketched only her.'

‘Because I only want to paint young girls, Inspector.'

Ah
merde
, did Hasse feel it necessary to be so forthright? ‘And Liline?' he asked, looking up at the unfinished canvas.

Hasse was conscious of Louis's every expression. He was really very alert—too alert, thought Kohler.

‘We both taught a junior class at the Musée en Herbe—one has to do things like that. Children—yes, yes, I teach some of those who come to the Jardin d'Acclimatation. I did not
kill
any of them. I wouldn't. I've had enough of that. Look, I know it doesn't sound good, but …' He shrugged. ‘I've always wanted nothing more than this.' He indicated the clutter, and when what must have been one of the
quarter's
most torn-eared of strays leapt into his lap, welcomed it.

‘I thought I could secure for Liline a commission for the Linz Museum. A wounded SS being assisted from the rubble of Stalingrad perhaps. I don't know.
Something
to get her a bit of money and the freedom she needed.'

‘Freedom from whom?' asked Louis. Herr Hasse's French was very good.

‘From Vernet, who else?' Did they not know of it? wondered Hasse. ‘He wanted to divorce his wife and marry her. She hated living in that house. If it hadn't been for Nénette, she would have left long ago.'

To divorce his wife and marry her
… Ah
merde
, thought St-Cyr. Madame Vernet must have known of it.

‘Nénette needed Liline?' asked Kohler pleasantly enough.

‘The child's parents were dead. The bombing of Coventry …' said Hasse.

‘Yet the child could laugh as she posed for you, a member of the Occupying Forces?' asked St-Cyr.

Ah, damn this one, thought Hasse. ‘I work from photographs. I have a camera with a telephoto lens. The girls did not know I was taking their picture.'

When the photograph was found, it wasn't the only one. Girls of from eight to fourteen had been caught in the Jardin d'Acclimatation, on the pony rides, at the puppet theatres, even on the steps of the restaurant and, yes, thought Kohler grimly, even near the cage of doves and the clay-pigeon shoot.

It was Louis who, holding several snapshots not of Nénette or Andrée but of others, said accusingly, ‘That is the Lycée Fénelon in the background, Herr Hasse. The oldest girls' school in Paris is but a few blocks from here and just off the rue de l'Eperon.'

There was no need to tell them anything, thought Hasse. Oberg had stated this very clearly, but Oberg was not here to dictate what would or would not be said.

They were both looking at him. A photograph slipped and fell but the Hauptmann Kohler patently ignored it. Had he deliberately dropped the thing so as to unsettle him? Of course he had. ‘I … I walk over to the lycée nearly every day—usually at noon, after the lunch break. There's a soup kitchen in the cellars run by some nuns. The girls come up and hang about for a few minutes if it's not too cold. Before, in the early fall, they would skip and play hopscotch. There are shots of their skirts flying up.' He stabbed at the photos. ‘Look, if you must. I'm sure you'll see their bony knees. I know it must seem damning, but you have to understand the artist seeks only the absolute truth of each moment.'

There were schoolgirls and schoolgirls and then … ‘That snapshot of Andrée and Nénette, Inspectors. It was taken in the early fall in the jardin. Liline saw me take it, and it was then that I asked if she could bring the girls to pose for me.'

Kohler had no longing for a cigarette. Hasse electrified the air with unspoken accusations and denials: I KNOW YOU THINK I DID IT, BUT I DIDN'T!

It was Louis who tidied the photographs and searched among the faces. Were the Sandman's other victims there? he wondered. ‘You must have made preliminary sketches of Nénette and Andrée, Herr Hasse,' he said. ‘If it would not be too much trouble, we would like a look at them.'

Anger rose in his gullet. Hasse waited until it had abated. ‘They're in the room I use for storage. Is this necessary?'

He could be cold when he wanted, still brutal, too, perhaps, but could he then calm himself, as the Sandman must have done, pausing long enough to remove all traces of pubic hair?

There was that little nod Kohler knew so well, a sadness to Louis's voice. ‘As necessary as it is for you to tell us where you were last Sunday between two and four p.m. Several of these photographs are of children at soup kitchens, Herr Hasse. Poor children. Children bundled in rags. Several are also of the Notre-Dame and its belfries. Please, you do understand? We're only doing our job.'

Like police the world over, they were unwilling to give respite until satisfied.

‘Well?' asked Louis of that Sunday.

Again that coldness came. ‘I was not in Paris. I was in Saint-Germain-en-Laye staying with a friend.'

When Hasse came back with three sketches, Kohler asked if he would allow them to borrow the snapshots. ‘Just for a little. They'll be returned. No problem.'

Ah, damn them. ‘I could refuse, but I won't. You see, I
want
you to find the person responsible for the killings, especially those of Liline and Andrée.'

The sketches were good but showed two very subdued and uncertain girls who didn't really want to pose or be anywhere near the studio or the artist.

He would have to tell them. ‘I paid Liline to bring the girls. Two hundred francs a sitting. They knew she needed the money and that it was a lot, so suffered through, but I couldn't change their opinions of me. They dreaded being near. That's why I have to use the camera.'

‘Did they know she was pregnant?' asked the Sûreté.

‘I think they must have, but we never discussed it. I thought, and said so each time, that the money would assist Liline in finding accommodations of her own.'

‘But it was for the abortion?'