Sandman (30 page)

They paused. They did not like the situation at all. They had to find Nénette Vernet but feared they were too late.

The Daimler wasn't there, the entrance to the house was locked. All window grilles were bolted solidly.

When they rang the bell, they had to wait, and the sound of it, escaping into the
impasse
, was overly loud. ‘Ah
merde
, Louis, why does that God of yours have to do this to us?'

God had nothing to do with it, and Hermann knew as much. ‘Maybe He's trying to tell us something about the SS.'

‘As if we didn't already know enough!
Verdammt
, where the hell is the piss-assed concierge?'

He rang the bell again, yanking so fiercely on its chain the damned thing snapped, and for some reason the bell-stop jammed and the bell rang and rang until its ancient spring finally tired itself out.

At last the thing shut up. Sometime later a bolt was slid back, another and another.

From the darkness, a voice said, ‘He's not here. He has gone to his lesson.'

They moved aside. They shone their torches into the concierge's face, causing him to blink and yelp and duck away in fear. Kohler towered over him. St-Cyr simply said, ‘Take us up to his rooms. Open the flat and wait in the corridor. We haven't time for magistrate's orders. Not now, so do not bother to ask.'

‘The … the electricity in this
quartier
has been off for some time, messieurs. There … there are no lights.'

The SS again.

‘That doesn't matter,' breathed Kohler. ‘We're getting used to the dark. Now move.'

‘A child of eleven,' hazarded St-Cyr as they went up the stairs. ‘Has he been keeping her here?'

‘How should I know? I don't live in the front of the house but in the cellars. I
can't
watch everyone.'

‘Yet you knew he had gone to his lesson.'

‘Because I had heard the car start up and every Tuesday night he takes the life-drawing class at the Grande-Chaumière.'

‘And afterwards,' asked Kohler, ‘where does he go?'

‘To be with the older ones,
les filles de joie
perhaps. One does not ask of such as him. One only tries not to notice.'

‘How many schoolgirls has he had visit him up there?'

‘Lots. This I do know. He pays them. He tempts them. Most are from the streets and so poor he can do what he wants with them.'

‘
Merci
, that is just what we needed to hear,' said the Sûreté grimly. ‘Please wait for us. We will close the door but will not be long.'

‘You won't touch a thing, will you?'

‘Ah, don't be silly. We will only touch what is necessary.'

As before, the place was pungent with turpentine and oil paints and cluttered with canvases, but it was to the storeroom they went, not to the studio.

On canvas after canvas there were schoolgirls, most with their hair in braids but few with smiles, for here most had been captured, here most had been terrified.

‘Louis, take a look at this.'

By the tone of voice, Hermann had betrayed his sorrow. The beam of his torch faltered. He shook the thing and it came on a little stronger.

In the paintings, in corpse after corpse, schoolgirls of perhaps eleven to fifteen or sixteen years of age lay about the floor of a gymnasium. All naked, all lying there, just lying there.

Trapped … they'd been herded in and forced to strip and their screams, their cries rose up from the paintings as one.

They shut their eyes. They switched off their torches. It was Hermann who, breathing in deeply, said, ‘Ah,
Gott im Himmel
, Louis, it has to be him.'

How many had been violated only then to be shot down and silenced forever except for this? In painting after painting Hasse had recorded their demise, the triumph of war unleashed on children. All girls.

‘Let's go and pick him up.'

‘Oberg isn't going to like it,' said the Sûreté.

‘That can't be helped.'

The cat was at its saucer of milk. A tin of sardines had been emptied for it into another saucer, enough to feed a child and keep it alive for a week at least.

When the creature left its supper to find a radiator near the front windows, they saw it licking something and then playfully pawing at it and licking its claws.

A black cat with mucus-clotted sea-green eyes. A mangy, torn-eared thing.

‘Chewing gum,' breathed Kohler. ‘Louis, it hasn't been here long.'

There was a packet of the stuff on the cluttered coffee table among the jars of paintbrushes soaking in turpentine or standing upright and ready. ‘
Banana
,' he said, reading the ersatz flavour, one of so many that had been concocted and mixed with saccharin to tempt the taste buds of a defeated nation and keep the memory or the hope of better times alive.

In a land of approximate jam, mystery meat and non-alcoholic near-wine, port or Pernod, flavour was seldom totally captured, only reinvented, but kids would chew on this stuff anyway, especially if offered it and they wanted to calm their nerves. Ah yes.

‘She sat in this chair, Louis. There are dried oak leaves on the cushions.'

So there were, and some had all but been crumbled to dust while others still held their shape. Had they worked their way out of the coat lining they had stuffed? Had they come from a bouquet Hasse had set near his easel, upon which sat the unfinished sketch of Andrée Noireau and Nénette?

‘Hasse has used the leaves as models for those the girls are kicking in their three-legged race,' said Louis. ‘They may not be from the child's coat, Hermann. Indeed, I don't think they are, but perhaps he has held a few as he thought about those girls before crumbling them to dust'

‘Then how about this, eh?' demanded Kohler harshly. He held out a child's tooth-brush, its bristles well-worn and all but flattened. The torchlight shone on it.

Louis took the thing from him and read the name the manufacturer had given it.' “The Little Princess, fabricated in Lodz.” The Blitzkrieg in the East, September of thirty-nine. Ah
merde
…'

Nénette could have bought it on the black market, but that didn't seem likely even though the whole of Occupied Europe was awash with the debris of war. More likely Hasse had found it for her and she had forgotten to take it with her, or he had simply had it out to remind himself of what had happened in the gymnasium.

‘And this?' snapped Kohler, shining his torch on the thing. ‘A sketch map of the Jardin d'Acclimatation, Louis. The riding trails they followed, the stables, dressage grounds, pigeon-shoot and cage, ah damn.'

‘All with the distances marked off. The puppet theatres, the children's zoo, the restaurant with its
salon de thé
, the Musée en Herbe where he and Liline Chambert taught.'

‘“
Sunday 10 January at about 3.20 p.m
.” He's got that written down too. The cemetery, Louis, the convent school. Ah
Gott im Himmel, mon vieux
, what the hell are we to do?'

Sickened by the thought, they had no other choice but to continue. They had to find Julien Rébé, of course. They had not forgotten him. It was only that the SS had inadvertently put Hasse foremost in their minds by trying to shield Debauve and save that bastard from arrest.

They had to find Violette Belanger, they had to find Nénette.

And when all of that was done, or before it, they had to talk to Sister Céline. They had to find the Sandman.

Montpamasse was alive in darkness. At the carrefour Vavin, the intersection of the boulevards Raspail and du Montpamasse, the firefly-glows of hustling cigarettes and probing torch pinpricks were turbulent. The great
brasseries
of the late 1920s and before, the Dôme, the Rotunde, Sélect and Coupole, were all doing a roaring business. Troops eddied and flowed, staff cars emitted tiny, piercing beams from their headlamps, there was much honking among the
vélo-taxis
, the
gazogènes
and ancient, nag-drawn
calèches
. Lorries brought the boys in. Later the Feld-gendarmen and the Paris
gendarmes
would either lock them in each establishment at curfew or drag them back to their
Soldatenheime
.

Girls stood on the street corners. Girls sold themselves in the freezing cold. In desperation, for it was against the law for her to make the approaches but okay if the man went to her, one banged on the Citroën's side window. Louis rolled it down a centimetre.

Not realizing to whom she was speaking, she said, ‘I will do anything, monsieur. Anything.'

Kohler avoided argument by leaning over Louis to stuff a 100-franc note through the gap and tell her to go home. ‘You'll only catch the flu.'

‘I already have it!'

The window closed. They nudged on ahead, the acid of ‘Must you waste our money?' ringing in the driver's ears. They tried to pass a disgorging lorry. Sailors beat upon the car, hooting, shouting, rocking it until the accelerator was touched.

The boulevard du Montpamasse was pitch-black but through this the white metal studs of a
passage clouté
, a pedestrian crossing, glowed eerily. A whistle was blown.

‘Turn here,' said Louis.

‘It's one further.'

‘Idiot! How long have you lived in this city?'

‘Okay, you win! Don't get so uptight.'

The Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where sculpture and painting had been taught since 1904, was at Number 14. It was a street that, in the 1830s and '40s, Louis Philippe had frequented, dining and playing nearby in a dance hall—one could call it no other—which sadly was no more, thought St-Cyr. Well, no matter. If not the boulevard du Montpamasse, then the clubs, the bars and cinemas of the rue de la Gaîtè, the rue Delambre, ah yes, and others. Yet here it was reasonably quiet. Here the steam had not yet been released from a boiler of a different kind.

No one could have been less intelligent or more desperate for money than Julien Rébé. The fortune-teller's son was the mannequin. The drawing studio was huge, antiquated, panelled in darkly stained tongue-and-groove cedar and, because of the electricity outage, lighted by kerosene lamps that smoked. It was crowded and stepped down in tiers, while a balcony above was reserved for those who wished only to think about art as a life's work and could dwell on the subject from rows of wooden benches. Far below them, the budding artists stood or sat and the scratches of their charcoal sticks on drawing paper rose up to fill the hall. Now a cough, of course, for it was the season for them. Now a quiet exchange with the drawing master, now a look, a line, a scratch, a rubbing with the thumb to shade and work the charcoal in.

Kohler heard Louis lightly tap the brass railing that kept them back from the precipice. ‘Down there. To the far left. Herr Hasse, but he is not sketching our mannequin. He's working on something of his own.'

Two
flics
, one a giant, were far too conspicuous. They sat down. They took off their fedoras but kept their overcoats on. More than half the students were men of the Occupier and most were in uniform. All were bent on sketching, all were very serious about it. Laced among them there were a few older Frenchmen, many more women, some of the grey mice but most French. Old, young, lots of the not so young, the lonely whose husbands were locked up in prisoner-of-war camps or eternally in the arms of death.

A discus thrower Julien Rébé was not—well, not tonight. Tonight he was the standard bearer who clutched his staff and wore a Roman centurion's expression but nothing else.

He had a good body, was of medium height and well proportioned, lithe and muscular, with lots of dark reddish brown hair on his legs, groin and chest, far less of it on his head, for he'd saved money and had had the haircut of haircuts. It was not the Fritz-cut of the Occupier. It was far shorter. A bristlework for the ladies to rub.

He had started to grow a beard but it simply made the narrow face, high forehead and deeply sunken eyes look damned scruffy, though somewhat older perhaps than his twenty-six years. Two of the kerosene lamps stood on the dais before him, one on either side. The only heat in the place, of course, was from those lamps and from the students.

The girls, the women with fingerless gloves, were attracted to him and had obviously arrived early, since most of the nearest positions had been taken up by them. Rébé, though he held his pose, was still free to seek and maintain eye contact with some of them. There would be smiles, demurely affected or boldly provocative, given by some of the women but not visible from up here. Unspoken exchanges. Slender hopes perhaps or silently-agreed-upon assignations.

‘That clairvoyant mother of his must have looked in her crystal ball and then thrown him out without a sou, Louis.'

‘And disowned him. At break-time he will go into the corridor to where his clothes are and will try to use them to get warm.'

‘I'll tie them in knots, shall I?'

‘Herr Hasse seems not to care about him at all.'

Was the centurion so completely without conscience or so desperate he could ignore the killing of Andrée Noireau, or had he silenced Nénette and now thought he had no further worries? And what, please, then, of the Attack Leader who now spoke quietly to the drawing master?

Rébé heard two of the young women giggle. There was a faint murmur, another giggle, a hand to a mouth, a burst of ribald feminine laughter. One old man threw down his charcoal in disgust and cried out, ‘Shut your mouths, you silly bitches! Let those who wish to work do so.'

Rébé had noticed them up in the balcony. Unbidden, the erection he had been thinking about because of some attractive woman had suddenly become a strong reality. In panic, he turned and bolted from the dais, tripped, went down hard, knocked an easel over, and fled. There were hoots of laughter, much thrown charcoal, dismay on the part of some, and a sketch torn to shreds and offered up as a confetti.