Tapestry
Authors: J. Robert Janes
A St-Cyr and Kohler Mystery
J. ROBERT JANES
ContentsThis is for Robin Walz, Professor of History at the University of Alaska Southeast, to our mutual interest in this remarkable period of history and to our delight in its many ramifications.
Tapestry: History’s woven moment being spun and dyed, is linked pattern to pattern to design and panorama, hiding truth until unravelled.
Acknowledgements
All of the novels in the St-Cyr–Kohler series incorporate a few words and brief passages in French or German. Dr. Dennis Essar of Brock University very kindly helped with the French, as did the artist Pierrette Laroche, while Professor Schutz, of Germanic and Slavic Studies at Brock, helped with the German. A very special thanks must also be extended to Robin Walz for his marvellous
Pulp Surrealism
, to Sarah Fishman for her excellent
The Battle for Children: World War II, Youth Crime, and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth-Century France
and
We Will Wait—Wives of French Prisoners of War, 1940–1945,
and to photographer Alex Waterhouse-Hayward of Vancouver for his very kind assistance with all things Argentine. Should there be any errors, they are my own and for these I apologize.
Tapestry
is a work of fiction. Though I have used actual places and times, I have treated these as I have seen fit, changing some as appropriate. Occasionally the name of a real person is used for historical authenticity, but all are deceased and I have made of them what the story demands. I do not condone what happened during these times. Indeed, I abhor it. But during the Occupation of France everyday crimes of murder and arson continued to be committed, and I merely ask, by whom and how were they solved?
Each stood in a doorway, out of the rain, and when the slit-eyed, blue-blinkered light from Louis’s torch found the blocky faces, Kohler saw that impassive gazes were returned.
Each then evaporated into the blackout, the
click-clack
of the Occupation’s wooden-soled shoes earnestly retreating along the
passage
de la Trinité, a lane so narrow and old, water rushed down its centre finding the shoes first and sewers second. Rain, an icy, bone-numbing rain: Paris, Thursday 11 February 1943 at 11.47 p.m.
It gushed from downpipes to fountain across the
passage
, blocking all reasonable access to the
vélo-taxi
that had been crammed into a doorway. A bicycle taxi across whose backside bold letters gave …
Ach, mein Gott
, could a better-chosen name have been found?
PRENEZ-MOI. JE SUIS À VOUS
. Take me. I’m yours. And stolen too!
‘HERMANN, LET ME!’
Jésus, merde alors,
how many times had he heard Louis yell it like that? A rape, another grisly murder probably and they not home more than an hour. Dragged off the train from Colmar, Alsace and now the Greater German Reich, ordered here or else. Two honest cops, one from each side, and fighting common crime when everybody else was in on it. ‘She’s all yours,
mon vieux
. I would never have found her without you.’
‘Grab the last of those departing
filles de joie
. Tell her that pneumonia is in the offing and that if she doesn’t answer truthfully, I will personally deny her the necessary medical treatment but not the VD checkups she has constantly been avoiding!’
Louis shouted things like that just to keep his partner sane. ‘She’s already agreed. Hey, her hand’s cold, wet and trembling, but I’m calming her.’
‘
Bon
. Without a licence she’s going to need it. Is that still the
quartier
de Bonne-Nouvelle’s most notorious
maison de passe,
madame?’ Louis rammed a pointing hand towards a door of no edifying virtue.
‘Oui,’
she grunted dispassionately. Purposely he didn’t hear her, so she yelped it again and shrilled, ‘MESSIEURS, I KNOW NOTHING OF THIS MATTER. I AM SOAKED TO THE
PRÉFET
’S GOATEE AND CANNOT SWIM!’
The walk-in hotel, one of Paris’s many to which the street girls took their clients, asked no questions, took no names and, like the
passage
, preferred anonymity.
‘Snow should soon begin,’ shouted Louis as he reached to open the closest of the taxi’s doors, ‘but first there will be the ice pellets.’
Half of him was soon squeezed inside the
vélo-taxi
. From it Kohler could hear the muted, ‘
Ah, mon Dieu
, mademoiselle, you’re safe now. My name is Jean-Louis St-Cyr of the Sûreté, but I’m not like most of those. We’ll get the one who did this. We won’t stop until we do.’
He ducked out to earnestly confide, ‘Hermann, let that one go. This one’s not only been savagely raped but brutally beaten. We’ll have to take her to the
Hôtel-Dieu
and quickly.’
More couldn’t be said, but through the celluloid of the side windscreen, a fever of blue-washed light passed quickly over the victim before being extinguished. ‘Easy, mademoiselle. Easy. Please don’t try to talk.’
‘My children …’
‘Madame, we’ll see to them.’
‘My papers. My keys. Our ration cards and tickets. My wedding ring.’
‘Please don’t concern yourself further. Rest… . Just try to rest.’
‘She’s passed out, Louis.’
‘Fish oil, Hermann. That taxi reeks of it. There’s grease on the seats and on her neck and shoulders.’
At 1.07 a.m. sleet pinged off the Citroën. They had put the woman, as yet unnamed, into the very best of hands, felt Kohler, had got his little Giselle and his Oona to watch over the children, and would get back to her as soon as possible, but
liebe Zeit
was there to be no rest? Bleakly he gripped the steering wheel and stared through the shrapnel at the silvery darkness the storm and the blackout gave to the boulevard Montmartre. Not another car was in sight, of course, for virtually all of them had disappeared from the city in June 1940, the crowds, too, at this hour, and didn’t the Führer pride himself on having war-torn Europe’s only open city and the good example it set of all things Nazi?
The
passage
Jouffroy, at number 12, had been built in 1846, thought St-Cyr, but Hermann didn’t need a travelogue, not with Walter Boemelburg, his boss and Head of Section IV, the Gestapo in France, breathing down their necks and a telex that had summoned them on the run: return hq immediately / streets being terrorized by blackout crime, and so much for the Führer’s shining example of an open city.
Pitch-dark, beyond the regulation dim pinpoint of blue that should mark its far end and exit, the glass-and-iron roofed Jouffroy was much wider than that of the open-slotted Trinité. Secondhand books specializing in photographic equipment most could only dream of in this third and most miserable winter of the Occupation were on offer; secondhand mechanical toys, too, and walking sticks and umbrellas …
‘Used postage stamps,’ grumbled St-Cyr. ‘That’s not you is it, Agent Bélanger, not the officer I last worked with here on the thirteenth of October 1939, the one who had been wounded in the left shoulder at Verdun in the autumn of 1917?’
To flatter a Parisian
flic
was even more insane than trying to grease one of their waiters without offering cash, but this one, Kohler noted, was a
hirondelle,
one of the swallows with cape and bicycle, and God help him if he tried to ride that chariot he had chained to the light standard.
Briefly Bélanger shone his torch over them. The Gestapo was a draining giant of fifty-five with pale-blue eyes and an expression the torchlight did nothing to alleviate; the Frenchman, a former
boxeur
of the Police Academy, was blocky, chunky, broad-shouldered, of medium height and fifty-two years of age, the big brown eyes noticing everything, the full, dark brown soup-strainer one that should definitely suffer decapitating scissors and a razor, lest the stomach get a hairball.
That terrible scar of the Bavarian’s was on the left and ran from eye to chin. Everyone had heard of it. The police, the Sûreté, the SS and Gestapo. Honest … these two were not only known for their absolute honesty, that scar was the reward an SS whip had given Kohler for their steadfastly having pointed the finger of truth, the idiots.
‘It is this way, Inspectors,’ grunted Bélanger.
Besides the truncheon, he toted one of those torches in which there was a dynamo that was activated by repeatedly pressing the thumb down on a lever. No batteries though, thought Kohler, and they did say the things didn’t wear out as easily but were a bugger on the thumb.
Au Philatéliste Savant was at the far end and not six steps from the old Hôtel Ronceray. The little blue exit light, mounted high on the wall, was there in its wire cage, but flickered instant warnings of yet another power outage: punishment of the population for the ‘terrorist’ actions of a few or simply industrial demands elsewhere. Always the power could be cut off.
Now suddenly not even the exit on to the rue de la Grange-Batelière could be seen but the door to this four-metre-wide shop had been jemmied. As Bélanger’s torchlight passed over them, banks of envelopes stuffed with collector’s ‘bargains’ appeared. Nothing over five and ten francs and yet there must be thousands of the envelopes, felt Kohler, astounded by the dedicated patience of the years and the musty smell of old, worn-out glue.
‘The safe is at the back, Inspectors,’ said Bélanger. ‘I have touched nothing.’
And did this last need to be mentioned? wondered Kohler, only to hear Louis patently ignore the fact and ask, ‘Time of entry?’
The torch went out to give it a rest. ‘Inspectors, you must understand that I didn’t make my rounds here until forty-five minutes past midnight. Immediately I have called in.’
‘As you should have,’ said Louis. ‘Give us a span, if you think it appropriate, but narrow it as much as is prudent.’
And if that wasn’t polite and deferential, what was?
‘From twenty minutes past midnight to thirty. Normally I would have been here between those times, but heard a disturbance in the
passage
des Panoramas and have retraced the steps for another look.’
More up-market, though older, that
passage
was right across the boulevard Montmartre at number 11. ‘Why didn’t the alarm go off here?’ asked Kohler.
Pumped torchlight momentarily touched the
flic
’s heavy black-rimmed spectacles before swinging aft and aloft to reveal the brass of an ancient clapper pan that was just above the inside of the door and would have awakened the dead had its fist-sized hammer been allowed to continue and not been silenced by a wad of rat-grey clay.
‘Which reeks of the sewers, Hermann,’ muttered the Sûreté, having beaten his partner to it while under cover of darkness. ‘Put in place as entry was gained.’
‘The alarm known about?’ quipped Kohler.